Sonia Boyce knows something will happen when she brings strangers into the same room, but she never knows quite what.
“The not knowing is an essential ingredient of improvisation,” said Boyce, during a video call from her London studio. “You don’t quite know where it’s going to go, but it's going to go somewhere.”
For over four decades, the British Caribbean artist has organized unscripted collaborations where she brings together musicians, artists, community groups, and activists—and then steps back, allowing spontaneous moments to unfold with tenderness, awkwardness, humor, and unexpected beauty. This process has resulted in critically acclaimed works such as Feeling Her Way (2022), which brought together the improvised vocal performances of four Black women musicians and won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the Venice Biennale in 2022. It marked a major moment of recognition for the artist, who was included in the 2020 Artsy Vanguard. Next spring, Tate Britain will open the first major survey of her four-decade career.
Last month, she opened “Demonstrate” at the Queens Museum, her first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The exhibition opened concurrently with Boyce’s Times Square installation Transform (2026), a commission for the Midnight Moment program that was itself drawn from footage filmed at the Queens Museum. At the Queens Museum, Boyce transformed two days of unscripted performances and community workshops held at the museum in 2025 into an installation of 14 films, photographs, wallpaper, and sound. Sculptural furnishings and layered sound become a vibrant landscape of overlapping voices, songs, and testimonies, culminating in a seven-channel video of participants processing through the museum together.
“It’s often a little bit chaotic,” Boyce said of her methodology. “I don’t direct the performers; I don’t direct the crew. I just say, ‘Capture what you think is interesting.’” Only afterward does Boyce return to the footage, distilling these encounters into the layered multimedia installations for which she has become known.
In the early 1980s, Boyce rose to prominence as part of Britain’s Black Arts Movement and became known for her figurative pastel drawings and photographic collages. By the early 1990s, however, the artist felt the need to move beyond self-representation, opening her practice to collaboration and improvisation. The shift fundamentally changed her work, allowing her to embrace unexpected moments of imagination.
“With all of my projects, and…definitely since the ’90s, I will convene a performance to take place with the hope that the audience gets involved in the work in one way or another,” said Boyce. “There are often moments of awkwardness and people not quite knowing what they’re supposed to do. But then something happens….Something clicks and people get on board and they run with it. That’s part of what I’m interested in: how a group manages to negotiate a way to get along together.”
At the Queens Museum, Boyce captured processions and performances over the course of two days in October 2025. These ranged from the building of a Día de los Muertos ofrenda or offering to a processional performance by the Resistance Revival Chorus.
In some ways, the Queens Museum surprised Boyce. The artist has a long friendship with the museum’s outgoing director, Sally Tallant. Visiting the museum several times, she was struck by the way the institution was already an active meeting place for a variety of communities, from children’s workshops to LGBTQ+ groups.
Several years ago, while touring the institution’s storage spaces, Boyce came across the remnants of an earlier education project, which the museum called the “Empanada Spaceship.” The sculpture had been conceived and built by local children before being paraded through Corona Park. The discovery crystallized Boyce’s approach to creating in the museum, seeing the space not only as a place for exhibiting art, but a place of community imagination.
“I just love this idea that there could be this museum that was hosting lots of different communities, but they’re being brought together through the act of making,” she said. “Most of the people that were there during the days of filming already knew the Queens Museum….I wanted to find out why they come to the Queens Museum and what that making means to them.”
As the exhibition title, “Demonstrate,” hints at, Boyce is interested in both the act of showing or demonstrating and the act of political protest. Queens is recognized by researchers and linguists as the most ethnically and linguistically diverse urban area in the world, with nearly half of its residents born outside the United States. Boyce knows that, in the current political climate, the work inevitably takes on additional resonance.
“I’m trying to walk a tightrope, you could say, between the wider social, political context and the vibrancy of what happens in Queens in general…So in a way, it’s impossible to ignore the politics,” she said.
In many ways, “Demonstrate” brings together both playful and processional aspects of the Empanada Spaceship. Boyce had the chance to tap into an almost childlike creativity with the participants, as groups of strangers navigated through performances and crowded spaces.
“There’s an element of playfulness that kind of creeps in,” she said. “I’m really very interested in playfulness. And I do think as adults, we don’t take it seriously enough.”
Boyce worked with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a group of women and non-binary singers known for participating in political demonstrations, to create a procession through the museum, incorporating different community groups and ending at the Queens Museum’s iconic Panorama of the City of New York (1964).
In the exhibition, Boyce transforms these performances into an immersive environment that visitors can walk through—what she calls a “journey through space.” The wallpaper, a motif in Boyce’s work for decades, is a key part of that, transforming images from the day into repeating patterns.
“I’m constantly thinking about the encounter of the work,” said Boyce. “The wallpapers are both a way of containing the space, but also…it hopefully encourages audiences to sit, to stand, to move between backwards and forwards.”
The final video shows the procession through the museum across multiple monitors, allowing visitors to experience the collective energy of the museum community. Ultimately, Boyce hopes audiences become participants themselves, “processioning” through the exhibition alongside those on screen. “We make our own world, also in a wider political sense. We are all active in our world. Joy can be an act of resistance.”
Ultimately, Boyce believes those ideas need not be in conflict. “People coming together and imagining in really creative ways, I hope, is demonstrated in the work,” she said.
