Richard Mark Rawlins (b. 1967, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Trinidadian-British artist based in Hastings, UK. A graduate of the Royal College of Art’s Print programme (2019), his practice spans drawing, painting, printmaking, performance, and new media — united by a sustained inquiry into Caribbean life, post-colonial history, Black identity, and diaspora politics, with popular culture as both subject and weapon.
Rawlins works across graphite, acrylic, and mixed media, frequently employing image re-appropriation and archival material to construct works that operate simultaneously as personal memoir, cultural criticism, and political agitation. His practice is open-ended and socially engaged — rooted, as Professor Stuart Hall would have it, not in origins but in routes.
His work is held in the collections of the Wedge Curatorial Projects (Toronto), the AMBA Collection (London), the Soho House Art Collection (London and Brighton), Guest House Hotels, and the Art Collection of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago.
Recent exhibitions include the Drawing Biennial 2026 at Drawing Room, London; Alice Yard: An Instigator’s Handbook at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2025); The ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at Mall Galleries, London (2025); Is All of We, Is We in Truth at the Central Bank Museum, Port of Spain (2025); As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic at the Saatchi Gallery, London (2024–25); and the Drawing Biennial 2024 at Drawing Room, London. Earlier exhibitions include We Out Here at Hastings Contemporary (2023); 茶, चाय, Tea at the Horniman Museum, London (2023–24); Holding Space at Hauser & Wirth (2023); The Human Touch: Making Art, Leaving Traces at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2021); Get Up Stand Up Now at Somerset House, London (2019), curated by Zak Ové; the Global Africa Project at the Museum of Art and Design, New York (2010–11); and international presentations in Belgium, New Zealand, China, Barbados, Brazil, Paraguay, and Jamaica.
He has completed site-specific commissions for Hospital Rooms at the Titian PICU ward, Goodmayes Hospital (2021) and Springfield Hospital, Tooting (2022), and for the World Reimagined Project, with works installed at Trafalgar Square and across Leicester and Oxford (2022–23). Works have been sold through Hauser & Wirth in support of Hospital Rooms Arts Charity.
Rawlins was selected for the inaugural RBSA Drawing Prize and the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (both 2023), the Derwent Art Prize (2022), and the Ingram Prize (2020). He was an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, USA, in 2012.
His performance and durational work includes Conversations Over Tea (Hastings Contemporary, 2023) and 46 (They wouldn’t listen to Diane) (The Stade, Hastings, 2024). His film and video works have screened at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, the Dublin Smartphone Film Festival, and the 1 Minuto Festival, Brazil, where A Dress to the Nation won the prize in 2017.