A century after her birth, a retrospective exhibition of the works of Plymouth artist Beryl Cook is being held in the city she called home for four decades. “Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy” at The Box aims to bring serious artistic recognition to an artist whose colourful and comedic paintings of the city’s everyday life were often dismissed by critics.
The free exhibition follows on the heels of international shows in New York and Los Angeles, celebrating Cook’s love for the city where she lived and found inspiration. It seeks to reframe her as a documenter of Plymouth’s working-class, LGBTQ+ communities and vibrant nightlife.
As a self-taught artist, Cook produced over 500 paintings during her lifetime (1926-2008) and enjoyed commercial success. She received fan mail from around the world, some of which are included in the exhibition.
Her plus-size subjects were joyous drag queens, women, sailors and elderly ladies, all having a good time on nights out, shopping or playing cards and bingo. Interviewed for a BBC documentary in 1985, Cook said, “To be able to paint, I really need to see everything that’s going on. I love all the groups of girls all coming down together and the fellas all in groups.”
The Box describes Cook as a “cultural chronicler” who painted marginalised people and recorded their lives with joy, kindness and reverence. Curator Terah Walkup said, “She did it with genuine affection, technical mastery and unflinching honesty. Her work from the 1970s to 2000s captures working-class joy, body positivity, and queer culture with a sophistication that’s only now being fully recognised.”
Alongside the exhibition, life-size sculptures based on Cook’s artwork have been placed in four locations in Plymouth that inspired her paintings. The hope is that the public will interact with the sculptures, as Cook’s work was all about having fun.
Beryl Cook’s daughter-in-law, Theresa Cook, is “very excited” about the large-scale models and says more people volunteered their paintings for the exhibition than there was space. “Some of the paintings we’ve never seen. Beryl used to miss her paintings when they were gone. She would have loved to have seen them all together in The Box.”
The exhibition “Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy” runs at The Box in Plymouth from 24 January to 31 May, with free admission but pre-booked time slots required.
