Name Pearl Alcock | ||
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Pearl Alcock (1934 Jamaica – 2006, London, England) was a club owner and artist, best known as a British outsider artist.
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Life and work
Alcock moved to London from Jamaica in her twenties. First finding work as a maid, by the 1970s she had opened a dress shop on Railton Road in Brixton and later ran a cafe and an illegal shebeen, popular with the local gay community, on the same street.
Following the 1985 Brixton Uprising both her shop and bar had failed and she found herself on the dole and unable to afford a birthday card for a friend so she drew one. Monika Kinley, one of the country's leading advocates of Outsider Art, describes her as "a visual poet". In 2005 her work was included in Tate Britain's first exhibition of art shown under the term Outsider Art.