
My mother, Jenny Stein, who has died aged 99, was the first female artistic director of the Riverside Arts Centre in west London, where she was responsible for opening the Riverside Gallery. Prior to that she spent two years as acting director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, after having lived for a decade in South Africa, where she became involved in anti-apartheid activism.
Jenny was born in London to Allen Hutt, night editor of the Daily Worker newspaper, and Norma (nee Garwood), a secretary. She was a boarder at the progressive Summerhill school in Suffolk, after which she began working as a film assistant at the Crown Film Unit in London during the second world war.
There she met the South African actor and journalist Sylvester Stein, who was then serving with the Royal Navy. They married in 1946 and migrated to South Africa the same year, not long before apartheid became the official system of government in the country.
Both soon became active in the anti-apartheid movement. Sylvester was editor of Drum, a national magazine aimed at a black audience, and Jenny, in between having four children, hosted illegal meetings at the family home, breaking the colour bar.
In 1957 she became involved in the Alexandra township bus boycott, a protest against a 25% increase in bus fares, and was arrested for giving lifts to black workers in her car. As the official pressures on her and Sylvester steadily built, they decided to leave South Africa and returned to the UK in 1958.
Back in London, Jenny came into her own, making the family home near Regent’s Park a swinging 60s salon, overflowing with artists, singers, journalists and South African exiles. Doris Lessing was a regular visitor, as were Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine.
In 1970 she became assistant to Mark Glazebrook, the director of Whitechapel Art Gallery, and in 1972, when he left, ran the gallery for two years as its acting director.
During that period, despite financial pressures, Jenny continued the gallery’s tradition of innovation, exhibiting trade union banners and showcasing new and radical artists such as Joseph Beuys. But she had no formal art training and when the time came to choose a permanent successor to Glazebrook as director, she was passed over for the job.
Bouncing straight back from that disappointment with typical bravura, Jenny set up her own gallery, The House, on the ground floor of her home. But she soon had to give up that venture when she was approached by the Riverside arts centre in Hammersmith to become its artistic director in 1982. After opening the Riverside Gallery, she mounted a major David Hockney exhibition, but retired through ill health in 1983.
Jenny was a tough woman and expected those around her to be equally resilient. Whatever else she was, she was never boring.
Her marriage to Sylvester ended in divorce in the early 1980s. She is survived by three children, Jeremy, Lyndall and me. Another daughter, Harriet, died in 2021.