page_title: Nahem Shoa
section_title: Giant Heads
hierarchical_section_title: Nahem Shoa / Giant Heads
caption_attribution_description: English: Nahem Shoa's Portrait of Desmond Haughton in Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery.
context_page_description: Nahem Shoa is a contemporary London painter best known for his series of portraits, collectively called Giant Heads, which were painted at up to 15 times life size. He is also notable for having increased the number of portraits of Black and mixed-race British people on display in British museums. Shoa has won a number of awards and prizes for his work, and serves on The Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery's Contemporary Arts Panel. His work has been exhibited in London's National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy as well as at galleries and museums in other parts of the UK.
context_section_description: Shoa specialised in live-model portraiture until 2007. Unlike many portraitists, he worked with live models rather than reference photographs. His 2004 oil series Giant Heads, featuring British citizens from different ethnic and sexual backgrounds, was exhibited at four major solo shows: Bury Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Hartlepool City Art Gallery, and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. The artist said this series of paintings "aims to capture and celebrate the multicultural nature of our society."
  One of these works, Giant Head of Ben, was purchased in 2004 by Hartlepool Art Gallery with the assistance of a grant from The Art Fund.
  Shoa's objective behind his four 2004 shows was to rebalance the lack of positive imagery for Black Britishers in UK art galleries. He had noted that Black people were portrayed there almost exclusively in the historical context of slavery or servitude, and complained that, "in Tate Modern there isn't a single [B]lack  image and the same can be said of many major collections". His own culturally-diverse Jewish parentage, stemming from an Adenite Jewish father with "some Ethiopian blood" and a Russian-Scottish mother  — combined with a London upbringing in the multicultural Notting Hill neighborhood notably characterised in the London novels of Colin MacInnes — fostered Shoa's early sensitivity to ethnic, gender and cultural injustices.
  
  The 2014 donation of Desmond — a portrait of his Notting Hill childhood pal, the Black British artist Desmond Haughton — to Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery demonstrated Shoa's ongoing egalitarian commitment. A 2015 article by Isobel Johnstone, past curator of the Arts Council Collection, discussed the significance of the donation: 
  Portraits of [B]lack subjects are rare in galleries even today and Shoa's picture makes a strong point by its very existence here. Artistically it measures up. It also reveals Shoa's painting skills — strong structure that is the legacy of Cézanne and Cubism, and vibrant colour created from a palette devoid of black and earth pigments. The close-up pose reflects the popular intimacy of today's media. This contemporary portrait of fellow painter Desmond Haughton is a small measure of what Shoa has been best known for to date.
  Desmond now hangs beside the Exeter gallery's iconic Portrait of an African — one of the rare 18th-century paintings of a Black gentleman of means. Portrait of an African was formerly believed to be of Olaudah Equiano, and is attributed to Allan Ramsay. Shoa's other portraits of Black Britishers hang in Bury Museum and Art Gallery and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery.
caption: Shoa's portrait of fellow artist Desmond Haughton on display beside Portrait of an African at RAMM
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