Sunil Gupta receives MBE

Hales congratulates Sunil Gupta on being awarded an MBE for Services to Art and to the LGBTQ+ Communities in this year’s King’s Birthday Honours list.
 
MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) rewards outstanding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service.
 
Over a career spanning more than five decades, Gupta has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work that are pioneering in their social and political commentary. The artist's diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration and queer identity - his own lived experience a point of departure for photographic projects, born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history.
 
Gupta's work is held in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Britain, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, amongst others. In 1989, Gupta co-founded Autograph - the Association of Black Photographers, and in 1992 he was awarded an INIVA curatorial franchise to support the Organisation for Visual Arts (OVA), aimed at promoting a better understanding of culturally diverse visual arts practices.
 
This autumn, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge will present Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now (19 September 2026 – 31 January 2027), the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date. The exhibition follows From Here to Eternity, a major touring retrospective curated by Mark Sealy, co-organized by The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020) and The Image Centre, Toronto (2022) in collaboration with Autograph, London. Recent institutional presentations of Gupta’s work include The Lovers at New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2025), Love and Light – A Sight of Infinite Possibilities at Chennai Photo Biennale (2025), and New Pre-Raphaelites at the Holburne Museum, Bath (2021). Gupta was also featured in Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at the Barbican, London, in 2020.
 
Unruly Desires – Reframing the Past, an exhibition by Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh, is currently on view at Leamington Spa Museum & Art Gallery through 6 September 2026.
June 13, 2026