Windrush Month 2024 'Celebrating the Caribbean pioneers of the 1940s & 1950s' - exploring the lives and stories of the the early Caribbean people who came to Britain after the 2WW.
Althea Marjorie McNish was born in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago around 1924. She was the only child of a well-to-do couple Joseph and Margaret Bourne. Her father, a teacher and writer, was descended from the Merikin settlers in Trinidad and her mother was a dressmaker. McNish showed a precocious talent for art at her mother’s knee: “My mother made clothes, but she didn’t draw,” she said. “She would say ‘I want a round collar’ and I would draw it. I was only four or five.”
An enthusiastic painter from an early age, while still in school she landed a job as an entomological illustrator with the colonial Trinidad and Tobago government. “I had to go into the field and do detailed drawings of insects to help in the sugar and cocoa pest control programme.” Later she became a junior member of the prestigious Trinidad Arts Society and had her first work exhibited at the age of 16.
At the time, Trinidad was at the centre of a Caribbean cultural renaissance, propelled by the struggle for independence and the need to forge a national identity. This would throw up an extraordinary array of talent that would produce some 50 novels between 1948 and 1958 and several internationally renowned artists. As McNish said, “There was quite an artistic thing going on at the time.” (1)
Inevitably, McNish would take influence from the leading lights of this movement, taking inspiration from local artists such as Sybil Atteck, Amy Leony Pang Boscoe Holder and M.P. Alladin. She also enjoyed European modernists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin. “Van Gogh was one of my favourites – he was very tropical” she said.
In 1951 McNish moved with her mother to London, England to join her father, who had already moved there to work. In London she won a scholarship to study architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture but chose instead to take a course in print studies at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts (now the London College of Communications) where she developed an interested in textiles. She took an extra class at the Central School of Art and Design, where renowned artist Eduardo Paolozzi taught. After completing her undergraduate studies, she went to complete a postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Art (RCA) where her talent was recognised by Hugh Casson.
In 1957 during her final year at the RCA, McNish took a trip to the Essex home of her tutor, the painter and graphic artist Edward Bawden and his wife Charlotte, a potter. When walking in the countryside near the Bawdens' home, McNish encountered a wheat field for the first time, which for her recalled sugar cane plantations in Trinidad. This trip and the organic forms found in the English countryside made a significant impression on McNish, and in 1959 she used the wheat motif in Golden Harvest – her first design for commercial design company Hull Traders. Produced in four colours, the furnishing fabric of printed heavy cotton satin was Hull Traders' best-selling design when released the following year and stayed in production until the 1970s. (2)
After graduating, McNish was hired by Arthur Stewart-Liberty – chairman of London’s Liberty department store – who famously commissioned the young graduate to create new exclusive designs for both fashion and furnishing fabrics. “He thought Britain was ready for colour and it was” said McNish.
On that same day, Liberty despatched McNish in a taxi to fashion supplier Zika Ascher, who likewise immediately booked her to create a new collection, this time for Dior. Successfully designing for such prestigious clients, McNish was the first Caribbean woman to achieve prominence in this field. (1)
McNish designed a range of fabrics for Liberty including a furnishing fabric called Cebollas with a strong tropical flavour – featuring blue onions set against a brown background – and another called Hibiscus, an even bolder furnishing textile boasting bright-red hibiscus flowers set against a sharply contrasting black background. (1) One of her most popular designs for Liberty included the abstract Cascade – a heavily textured cotton poplin fabric from 1959, featuring a black and blue background with small, overlaid circles repeated in bright reds, greens and blues. The pattern fizzed with energy and was reminiscent of observing a living organism under a microscopic eye. (2)
In 1959, for Hull Traders, a company later responsible for many of the colourful and irreverent pop designs of the swinging 60s, she created a sensation with Golden Harvest, a screen print on cotton satin used for upholstery fabrics that featured a bright-orange, yellow and black graphic pattern inspired by the wheat fields of Essex, which reminded her of Trinidad’s sugarcane plantations. (3)
By 1960 she was taking on jobs for Cavendish Textiles and then for Heal’s, for whom she designed Trinidad, a printed furnishing textile covered with a loosely sketched dense tropical forest, filled with green palm trees of different shapes and sizes. At this time, she also worked for Ascher’s textile company, which commissioned her to create printed silk dress fabrics. (3)
Other British manufacturers who approached McNish included Danasco Fabrics, for whom, in 1961, she produced Tomée, an exceptionally vivid monoprint of an abstract pattern made up of pink, orange and lemon stripes. In 1968, for the Bridlington-based firm Sanderson-Rigg, she designed a space-age-style wallpaper, named Zircon, featuring a dazzling abstract pattern coloured orange, mustard and yellow. (3)
McNish's reputation was such that she designed fabrics for Queen Elizabeth II's wardrobe for the 1966 Royal Tour of Trinidad and the Caribbean.
Throughout the 1960s McNish also ensured that she retained her links with the West Indies. She was a founding member of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) and took part in their art exhibitions held in 1967, May 1968 and January 1971, exhibiting textiles as well as ‘plastic panels in laminate.’ For the Caribbean edition of the BBC TV magazine programme Full house, produced by John La Rose and transmitted on 3 February 1973, she brought together the work of CAM visual artists as a studio setting for CAM writers, musicians and filmmakers.
In 1969, she married John Weiss, architect, jeweller and historian, and worked in partnership with him from 1971.
At the same time McNish’s artwork was being displayed in exhibitions – beginning with Paintings by Trinidad and Tobago Artists at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1961. Over the years her paintings and drawings were shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1978), the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester (2007) and, most recently, at Somerset House in London (2019). Examples of her textile design can be found in the V&A, the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. (3)
In 1976, McNish was awarded the Chaconia Medal Gold for her contributions to art and design, and in 2006 an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of Trinidad and Tobago, where she mentored many of its student designers. She also appeared on the BBC4 documentary Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? aired in 2018, and in the same year a section of the book Women Design, by the design historian Libby Sellers, was devoted to McNish and her work.
More recently, her work — represented by three printed textiles from early in her career: Golden Harvest, Pomegranate and Fresco — was featured in the exhibition RCA Black: Past, Present & Future (31 August–6 September 2011), organised by the Royal College of Art in collaboration with the African and African-Caribbean Design Diaspora (AACDD) to celebrate art and design by African and African-Caribbean graduates.
McNish was also an important presence in the wider British design scene. She was a member of the board of the UK’s Design Council and a Vice-President and Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers. (3)
Althea McNish died in April 2020 in a London nursing home at the age of 95.
A major retrospective of her work was held in April 2022, entitled Althea McNish: Colour is Mine. The exhibition was sponsored by Liberty Fabrics who reissued a capsule collection of her designs to coincide with the it.
Co-curator Rosie Sinclair of Goldsmiths College said:
“McNish was a rare Black woman within the international textile history. She broke boundaries [and] perhaps following this exhibition people will take another look at furnishing and fashion fabrics and wonder why colour became such an important part of new design taste in post-modern society and think about the individuals, a design pioneer such as Althea, who made this happen.”
On the 15 May 2023, coinciding with the 99th anniversary of her birth, a Nubian Jak blue plaque was unveiled in her honour at her former home on West Green Road in Tottenham, north London.
McNish was a gifted and pioneering force in textile design who brought colour into the lives of young consumers desperate to move beyond the greyness of post 2WW Britain. Her contribution to post-war British design and pioneering creative vision changed the character of British Modernism.
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