Yinka Ilori designs Somerset Home present celebrating 50 years of black creativity

Designer Yinka Ilori has used his signature vibrant and graphic model to create the exhibition design for Get Up, Stand Up Now, a present celebrating half a century of black creativity within the UK.

Ilori’s design sees the neoclassical rooms of Somerset Home in London remodeled with daring shades, as a backdrop for artwork, pictures, design, movie and style by black creatives.

The present is curated by artist Zac Ové, and contains items starting from video work to a Notting Hill Carnival trolley.

These are accompanied by archival images, letters and video clips that reveal how makers merged the non-public and the political to deal with the problems of their time.

Ilori – a decide of this yr’s Dezeen awards – is a London-based designer, though his roots are in Nigeria, and his work usually attracts on the colors and patterns of his African heritage.

His design for Get Up, Stand Up Now could be a riot of color and sample. Guests enter from the Somerset Home courtyard via a vibrant multi-coloured door encompass, which displays the brightly hued flags flying exterior.

Inside, bench seating is upholstered in a digitally printed cotton textile, designed within the model of wax batik material, and the partitions are painted in daring hues.

Wall-mounted listening cubicles are embellished with circles in contrasting shades.

The confluence of tropical colors and vivid sample continues alongside the hall that connects the gallery rooms, during which work is separated into 5 key themes: Motherland, Dream to Change the World, Masquerade, Imaginary Landscapes and Mothership.

The hall is lined with scallop-edged way-markers that point out the entrances to every room in vivid tones. The colors in these are mirrored within the paintwork of pillars, door frames and arches all through the area.

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The design creates a kaleidoscope of archways when trying from one finish of the exhibition to the opposite.

The overlapping kinds and shiny color palette echo Ilori’s design for The Color Palace, the multicoloured pavilion presently put in exterior Dulwich Image Gallery in south London.

In every exhibition room, the partitions, picket panelling, door and window frames and cornicing are picked out in contrasting tones with show cupboards embellished with repeat patterns based mostly on circles and graphic blocks.

The present additionally incorporates a “temple to studying” created by Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk, full with an Afrofuturist mural.

Books about black historical past and tradition can be found for guests to browse, whereas the bespoke desk and chairs are designed by Ilori.

Amongst the greater than 100 creatives with work on show are Turner Prize-winning artists Steve McQueen and Lubaina Himid, Scottish-born Trinidad-based painter Peter Doig, and artist Yinka Shonibare.

Alongside visible artwork, black creatives’ contribution to the music and movie scene can be represented, together with work by the curator’s father Horace Ové – the creator of the primary function movie by a black British director, 1975’s Strain.

The intersection between artistic practices can be explored. For instance, Faisal Abdu’Allah works as a barber alongside his creative observe. His gold-plated barber’s chair recognises the barber’s store as a website of cultural trade and camaraderie.

A sequence of movies exploring subjects of black identification and creativity are proven on a loop in a specifically constructed screening room on the finish of the exhibition and numerous talks and cultural occasions will happen throughout the run.

Get Up, Stand Up Now runs on the West Wing galleries in Somerset Home till 15 September 2019.