Donald Rodney (born 1961, West Bromwich, England; died 1998, London, England) was an innovative and genre-defying artist, who illustrated his versatility through a range of mediums including painting, robotics, photography, and film. Living with sickle cell anemia, he often worked with materials of medicalization—X-rays, medical tape, medical tubing—to foreground notions of distance, separation, and absence in relation to the body. Appropriating images from mass media, Rodney spoke critically about corporeality, fragility, culture, and existence. He used materials, particularly the X-ray, as both surface and metaphor for medical and racial violence, a masterful juxtaposition where the body and social political conditions are rendered inseparable. In March 1998, Rodney died at age thirty-six from sickle cell anemia. His artistic career spanned two decades, and he first achieved visibility as part of the BLK Art Group in the early 1980s. His work, most recently, was the subject of the touring retrospective Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, which toured throughout the UK to Spike Island, Bristol; Nottingham Contemporary; and Whitechapel Gallery, London.
