CaribWorldNews, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Oct. 17, 2008: The drawings and mixed media sculpture of Guyanese-born artist, Donald Locke, will be on display at the Skoto Gallery throughout this month.

The `Master Works/Recent Works` of Locke is set to run through November 22 at 529 West 20th Street, 5thFL, New York, NY  10011.

Locke was born 1930 in Stewartville, Demerara County, Guyana, South America and currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been active on the international scene since the early 1950s and studied at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, England 1954-1957 on a British Council Scholarship.

In 1964, he graduated with honors from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland with a master degree in art. After returning home to Guyana to work and teach for some time, he returned to Europe where he lived and practiced his art until being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979. Locke has been the recipient of several other prestigious awards, and he represented Guyana at the Twelfth Sao Paulo Biennial in 1971 and The World Black Festival of Arts, Lagos, Nigeria in 1977.

Like many artists and writers of his generation who came of age during the forties; fifties and sixties; a period of anti-colonialist movements in India, Africa and the Caribbean, Donald Locke has developed a critical framework to engage with issues of history, identity and authenticity. His work confronts tradition while absorbing the formal tenets of modernism. He challenges the assumption that if an artist is at a distance from the metropolitan centers and uses the vocabulary of Western modernism, that the work automatically lacks `authenticity.`

His work is in several private and public collections around the world including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Guyana National Collection, Georgetown, Guyana, South America; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.