Pearl Alcock Transcript
Because Manchester Pride isn’t happening this year physically, but it is happening digitally, and because the gallery isn’t open over that period, we thought we would show you digitally some of the collections.
As the Friday of Manchester Pride is the start of the weekend celebration, we thought we would show you a work by an artist called Pearl Alcock, ‘Celebration of the Night,’ painted in 1987. Pearl Alcock was part of the Windrush generation, and arrived in Britain in 1957, first taking up residence in Leeds, and then moving down to Brixton in the early 1960s. Pearl was a character, having an ambition to open a dress shop – a boutique – had an interest in fashion and shoes, and worked very hard within hospitality, hotels, to get the money together to be able to open that boutique. She managed to open a boutique on Railton road, getting the money together, and underneath in the cellar she opened a shebeen; a shebeen being an illegal bar where people came to have a drink, to have a dance, and to meet other like minded individuals. Pearl Alcock’s shebeen was an anchor place for the black gay community, as they were often unwelcome in many of the other queer spaces in and around London. It was an anchor point and kept a lot of people within the community.
Painted a few years later, ‘Celebration of the Night’ is almost like Pearl Alcock remembering those nights within the shebeen, where people are dancing, having fun, coming together, and meeting each other. With the patterns and the colours and the textures within this work, it’s almost like Pearl is giving us an insight into some of the things that we’ll be missing this year at Pride.
Queering The Whitworth 