The Congregation is a new mural artwork for Brixton Underground station by artist Rudy Loewe. Launched on 20 November 2025, the work will be on view for a year.
Loewe is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, and sculpture. Their work invites and amplifies those voices suppressed by dominant retellings of history, thereby making space for different forms of knowledge. It channels the narrative energy of comics and the clarity of illustration by combining text and image with the use of vivid colour.
The Congregation honours Brixton’s history as a place of resistance and community gathering, particularly for London’s Black communities. The work features twenty scenes celebrating the figures and history of the local area. Loewe interweaves stories from archival research and interviews, visualising the rich, sensorial experience of Brixton. With The Congregation, Loewe offers an alternative entry point into Brixton as a place that has been a focal point for Black communities over the last 75 years.
Loewe’s new work for Brixton pays tribute to figures and communities which have shaped the culture of the local area, including depictions of the Windrush Generation’s arrival in Brixton in the late 1940s and SisterMatic, a Black lesbian-run sound system who have been known for offering much-needed lesbian nightlife in the area, and beyond, since the mid-1980s. Other sitters include, TfL Train Operator, CJ Rivers, depicted with their child, and activist Marcia Rigg in ‘Holding the Flame’, a virtual statue created by Aswarm in memory of her brother, Sean Rigg, who died in police custody at Brixton Police Station in 2008.
The work also features local landmarks, places and cultural spaces, such as the 121 Centre on Railton Road, one of the UK’s longest-running squats, where famously activist Olive Morris lived during the 1970s; Southwyck House, a large brutalist-style housing association development known locally as ‘Barrier Block’ for its dominating presence; and artist Pearl Alcock’s underground bar, which she ran from her flat on Railton Road as a social space for Black gay men in the 1990s.
Brixton’s activist history is honoured through the inclusion of sites such as the Frontline Off Licence on Atlantic Road, a significant landmark as the site of the first resistance during the 1981 Brixton Uprising; and the annual noise demonstration outside HM Prison Brixton, taking place every New Year’s Eve in solidarity with prisoners.
Alongside Brixton’s history of activism and community organising, Loewe highlights daily acts of intergenerational gathering, joy and care. People are depicted chatting outside The Powerful Hand, a spiritual shop, as long queues form outside Healthy Eaters, a popular Jamaican restaurant. Teenage girls walk through the streets as women shop with young children at the market on Electric Avenue, and older men meet and chat in Windrush Square.
The Congregation visualises the rich social and political history of the local area and the intertwined stories of its people and communities, which have made and continue to make Brixton a place of gathering, connection and collective resistance, particularly for Black communities.
Rudy Loewe, said: “For my Art on the Underground commission, I wanted to capture the aliveness of Brixton. As soon as you step out of the Tube station, there’s such a rich sensorial experience and it was this that I wanted to transmute into painting. There are preachers, loud music, people singing; you can hardly walk down the street without having an unexpected conversation with someone. It makes it a very special place in London. To me, there is something about all of this that is so West Indian and that I wanted to foreground.”
About Rudy Loewe
Rudy Loewe (b.1987) is a visual artist living in London, UK. Loewe’s work examines socio-political dynamics and narrates histories collected through archival research, weaving in African and Caribbean folklore. Through media such as painting, drawing, and sculpture, Loewe unravels British government operations attempting to dismantle Caribbean black resistance movements during the 1960s and ‘70s as part of their ongoing PhD research. Anansi, the trickster, is a recurrent character in Loewe’s work, whom they envisage as a gender-nonconforming shapeshifter. Loewe questions who amongst us is forced to shapeshift to survive.
Loewe has exhibited internationally in institutions and galleries, including the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, UK; South London Gallery, UK; Royal Academy, UK; Regart Centre D’Artistes En Art Actuel, CA; Serpentine Galleries, UK; Marabouparken, SE; Independent Art Fair, USA; and the 2024 Toronto Biennial, CA. Residencies include Toronto Biennial, Canada (2024); Cooper Cole Gallery, Canada (2024); Labverde, Brazil (2023); Wysing Arts Centre, UK (2023); Serpentine Galleries, UK (2020); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada (2019).
