Keith Piper (artist)

Keith Piper
Born	1960 (age 56–57) Malta
Nationality	British
Education	Trent Polytechnic; Royal College of Art
Known for	BLK Art Group
Website	http://www.keithpiper.info/

Keith Piper (born in 1960) is a leading contemporary British artist, curator, critic and academic. He was a founder member of the groundbreaking BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students, mostly based in the West Midlands region of the UK.

Piper was born in Malta to a working-class family of African-Caribbean heritage and raised in and around Birmingham. He was first attracted to art as a response to the industrialised, decaying landscape of his youth. Quoted in his monograph Relocating the Remains he recalls being "interested in the aesthetics of peeling paint, rust and dereliction and the multi-layered look of fly posters when they become torn off". Piper went on to attend Trent Polytechnic, where he gained his B.A.(Hons) in Fine Art in 1983, before graduating with a master's degree in Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art in London.

Although Piper’s early and student work made use of traditional fine art media such as paint and canvas (such as The Body Politic, 1983), from the late 1980s he became primarily associated with technically innovative work that explored multi-media elements such as computer software, websites, tape/slide, sound and video within an installation-based practice.

Piper first came to public attention when, in 1982, while still a student, he joined Eddie Chambers, the late Donald Rodney and Marlene Smith in what came to be known as the BLK Art Group. Their politically forthright exhibition The Pan-Afrikan Connection garnered media attention as it toured to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham; King Street Gallery in Bristol; and The Africa Centre in London. In 1983-84 a second touring exhibition, The BLK Art Group, was held at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry, Battersea Arts Centre in London and, again, the Africa Centre.

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