Pearl Alcock


Pearl Alcock was a club owner and artist, best known as a British outsider artist.

Life and work

Alcock moved to London from Jamaica in her twenties, abandoning her marriage in Jamaica. 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. She herself was known to be bisexual. Following the 1985 Brixton uprising both her shop and bar failed and she found herself on the dole and unable to afford a birthday card for a friend so she drew one. Alcock described this realization of her knack for drawing: “I went mad scribbling on anything I laid my hands on,”she explains, “friends admired what I had done and began to bring me materials to use, that is how I started.”
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.
In spite of her high regard in the context of Outsider Art, Pearl Alcock's work has been offered at auction multiple times and only one artwork has sold; this was "Thukela River", which realized $294 USD at Germann Auctions in 2012.

Selected exhibitions

Alcock’s possession of a shebeen retained an unprecedentedly important place in the Brixton LGBTQ scene for the time. A white British man named Simon recalled the place as a hub of interaction for both the local LGBTQ black and white populations:
“Always heaving...a space this sort of size packed with people dancing, and there would be a bar at the end selling Heineken or cocktail type stuff, martinis and so on...there were only one or two women there, about 80 % black men, 20 % white I suppose. Of the black guys that would go to Pearl’s...maybe half of them would be in a relationship with a white person, and half would be in a relationship with a black person.”