Pearl Alcock

Pearl Alcock (1934 Jamaica – 2006, London, England)[1] was a club owner and artist, best known as a British outsider artist.

Life and work

Alcock moved to London from Jamaica in her twenties, abandoning her marriage in Jamaica.[2] First finding work as a maid, by the 1970s she had opened a dress shop on Railton Road in Brixton[3] and later ran a cafe[4] and an illegal shebeen, popular with the local gay community,on the same street.[5] She herself was known to be bisexual.[5][6] Following the 1985 Brixton uprising both her shop and bar failed and she found herself on the dole and unable to afford a birthday card for a friend so she drew one.[3] Alcock described this realization of her knack for drawing: “I went mad scribbling on anything I laid my hands on,”she explains, “friends admired what I had done and began to bring me materials to use, that is how I started.”[2]

Monika Kinley, one of the country's leading advocates of Outsider Art, describes her as "a visual poet".[7] In 2005 her work was included in Tate Britain's first exhibition of art shown under the term Outsider Art.[8]

In spite of her high regard in the context of Outsider Art, Pearl Alcock's work has been offered at auction multiple times and only one artwork has sold; this was "Thukela (Tugela) River", which realized $294 USD at Germann Auctions in 2012.

Selected exhibitions
  • 2005: Outsider Art, Tate Britain, London [9]
  • 1989: Three Brixton Artists: Pearl Alcock, George Kelly, Michael Ross, 198 Gallery, London[10]

The Brixton LGBTQ Community

Alcock’s possession of a shebeen retained an unprecedentedly important place in the Brixton LGBTQ scene for the time. A white British man named Simon recalled the place as a hub of interaction for both the local LGBTQ black and white populations:

“Always heaving...a space this sort of size packed with people dancing, and there would be a bar at the end selling Heineken or cocktail type stuff, martinis and so on...there were only one or two women there, about 80 % black men, 20 % white I suppose. Of the black guys that would go to Pearl’s...maybe half of them would be in a relationship with a white person, and half would be in a relationship with a black person.”[5]

References
  1. "Pearl Alcock". artprice.com. Retrieved 21 September 2015.
  2. "Outsider Art: Exhibition guide: Biographies". tate.org.uk. Retrieved 21 September 2015.
  3. Kurlansky, Mark (1992). A Continent of Islands: a searching for the Caribbean destiny. Addison-Weasley Publishing. pp. 236–238. ISBN 0201523965.
  4. Hilton, Tim (30 August 1989). "A Breath of Eire". The Guardian.
  5. Cook, Matt (2014). "Capital Stories: Local Lives in Queer London". In Evans, Jennifer V.; Cook, Matt (eds.). Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 47. ISBN 144114840X. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
  6. England, Historic. "Communities of Resistance | Historic England". historicengland.org.uk. Retrieved 2019-03-22.
  7. Steward, Sue (29 October 2000). "Outsider dealing". The Observer. London, UK. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
  8. "Outsider Art, Exhibition Guide, Biographies". Tate Britain. 2005. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
  9. "Outsider Art, Tate Britain". tate.org.uk. Retrieved 22 November 2015.
  10. Three Brixton Artists: Pearl Alcock, George Kelly, Michael Ross. 1989.

Further reading
  • Kinley, Monika. "Monika's Story: A Personal History of the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection". Musgrave Kinley Outsider Trust, 2005
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