Reconstructing Slave Stock

Abstract

This article examines a neglected example of slavery visualisation by Guyanese artist Stanley Greaves (1934–present). The work is called Slave Stock and is a unique example of abstract constructive sculpture made in 1965 while Greaves was studying at Newcastle University in the UK, where his tutors included Pop artist Richard Hamilton. After winning prizes in Newcastle and Guyana after Greaves’s return in 1968, Slave Stock entered the latter’s National Collection but was mysteriously destroyed sometime in the nineteen seventies. In 2018, over fifty years since its original conception, Greaves reconstructed this major lost work. Drawing on correspondence with the artist, this written reconstruction of Slave Stock locates its production and reception in relation to Greaves’s trajectory, encompassing his early artistic development in the context of British colonial education and Guyana’s ongoing independence struggle, as well as his engagement with transnational modernisms and wider histories of slavery visualisation and memorialisation.