Derek Boshier, 1937 – 2024

Derek Boshier, the British Pop artist and former University of Houston (UH) professor, died on Thursday, September 5, 2024, at the age of 87.

Perhaps best known outside of the artworld for his artistic contributions to David Bowie’s Lodger and Let’s Dance album covers, Mr. Boshier was a prominent figure in the British Pop art movement and spent over a decade teaching at UH. His early paintings touched on the Space Race, pop music, and the Americanization of Britain, but over the course of his six-decade career, Mr. Boshier’s practice, which continued to draw on popular culture, expanded to include photography, film, video, assemblage, and installations. 

Born in 1937 in Portsmouth, England, Mr. Boshier went on to study at the Yeovil School of Art in Somerset (1953 – 1957) and the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London (1959 – 1962). While studying at RCA, he, along with his classmates David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, and Peter Phillips, was included in the Young Contemporaries exhibitions at Whitechapel Art Gallery. These exhibitions brought attention to the developing Pop Art movement and its key players. In 1962, Mr. Boshier appeared in Ken Russell’s documentary Pop Goes the Easel. Commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the film was a portrait of Mr. Boshier and other Pop artists Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty, and Peter Blake.

Following his graduation from RCA, Mr. Boshier taught at the Central School of Art & Design from 1963 to 1979. There, one of his students was John Mellor, who later was known as Joe Strummer of The Clash. That connection led to an invitation for Mr. Boshier to design the band’s 2nd Songbook, a 56-page book that included lyrics and musical notation for the album Give ‘Em Enough Rope.

In 1980, Mr. Boshier traveled to Houston, where he had been invited to be a visiting artist at UH. The semester-long experience resulted in an official job offer. In an online spotlight on the Public Art University of Houston System (Public Art UHS) website, Mr. Boshier is quoted as saying, “The semester turned into a thirteen-year stay. I married and had two daughters in Houston.”

During his time in Texas, Mr. Boshier produced work that was influenced by the regional culture, featuring cowboys, oil derricks, the Gulf Coast, and the Houston skyline. In the 1980s and 1990s, his work was shown in various Texas venues, including the Graham Gallery, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Robin Cronin Gallery, Texas Gallery, and the Holocaust Museum in Houston; the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin; and the Weil Gallery Center for the Arts at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. More recently, in 2019, Red Bud Arts Center presented Derek Boshier: Paintings, Drawings, and Film: Selected Works 2004-2019, the first major show of his work in the city in about two decades. 

Fredericka Hunter, co-owner of Texas Gallery, told Glasstire, “For Derek, Houston seemed to be a rich source of inspiration for imagery of an exuberant nature. As always there was the juxtaposition of pop and political references with a great sense of humor and absurdity. It was a prolific and rich time in the studio with grand scale theatrical scenes rendered emphatically in paint.”

In 1992, Mr. Boshier left Houston to return to London. Before his departure, he gifted Public Art UHS with three artworks, Vogue, Oswald, and Lech Walesa; Mysteries–New Orleans; and The Exhibition. The works are on view at the University of Houston Downtown’s academic building. In 1997, Mr. Boshier returned to the U.S. He moved to Los Angeles, where he worked at the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles, until his death.

Throughout his lifetime, Mr. Boshier’s work was featured in 91 solo exhibitions and several significant group exhibitions, including Art and The Sixties at Tate, London; Pop Art: UK at the Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy; British Pop at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain; Pop Art Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London; and Made in Space at the Night Gallery in Los Angeles, the Gavin Brown Gallery in New York, and Venus over Manhattan in New York; among others.