Black British Artists Research Articles

Rebellion, Resistance, and Resilience: Three Black British Artists and Eco-Feminism

This paper critically discusses the work of three women artists of colour who, in different ways, engaged with environmental catastrophe and called for climate justice during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Leslie Hakim-Dowek, Gurminder Sikand, and Nina Edge each engaged in particular types of thoughtful, practice-led decolonial feminism that addressed the consequences of rampant corporate neo-colonialism and the ways that the global North has treated the global South as a site for material extraction and exploitation. Echoing the non-violent systems of protest of the women-led Chipko environmental movement in northern India, Sikand's delicate and gentle paintings may nonetheless be understood as searing eco-feminist statements; Edge's work from 1991 combines image and poetry to address the on-going consequences of the devastating industrial disaster at Bhopal, India, in 1984; while Hakim-Dowek's 1991 series of paintings titled Endangered Species (1991) presents a memorial to what has already been lost. This paper will argue that despite the curatorial and critical neglect experienced by these artists, their work nonetheless offers entryways into current, globally important, conversations about the ongoing struggle of women in the global South against white neo-colonial capitalism, and the fight for climate justice.

Make It Funky for Me: Black British Women’s Explorations of Britishness, Womanhood, and Artistry Through 2000s Music

ABSTRACT 2000s Britain was an interesting and expansive time musically for Black Britain (Bradley 2013), as underground music gained traction in mainstream spaces. This article examines the context in which Black British women were able to cross over into the British mainstream and explores how U.K. garage and U.K. funky artists expressed their creativity, autonomy, womanhood, Blackness, and Britishness. Female U.K. garage artists set a precedent in the creation of “new” diverse identities for Black British women artists, but artists in both underground and mainstream music scenes were also forced to contend with restrictive and harmful misogynoir.

Performing HeLa: theatrical bodies and living remains

As a biomedical entity that has been the subject of a plethora of artistic and cultural projects, HeLa, the first immortal human cell line, calls for investigations into the human....

Beyond Literature: Toni Morrison’s Musical and Visual Legacy For Black Women Artists

The aim of this article is to analyze Toni Morrison’s understudied influence on music and visual art. In 1994 she established the Atelier Program in Princeton University as an interdisciplinary arts program that supported and nurtured multifaceted collaborations between artists and students from different disciplines. Moreover, her oeuvre shows her craft in a number of literary and artistic spheres that include writing novels, short stories, children’s books, literary criticism, song cycles and the script for a musical and a play. Keeping in mind Morrison’s multidimensional engagement with literature and the other arts, the first half of the article delves into the contemporary musical responses to the writer, placing special emphasis on black women musicians such as rapper Akua Naru, neo-soul vocalist India Arie, and singer and songwriter Janelle Monáe. Morrison’s intersectional representations of gender and race relations across the history of the U.S. have similarly inspired visual artists. The second half of the article explores the visual creations by U.S. black women artists Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson and Amy Sherald. Morrison’s manifold articulations of blackness and womanhood similarly resonate on the other side of the Atlantic through the work of Lubaina Himid, the first black British artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2017.

Dearly Beloved or Unrequited? To Be ‘Black’ in Art's Histories

Guided by Stuart Hall's essay ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Post‐War History’ (2006), this special issue looks closely at the multi‐faceted genealogies of Black British modernism since the arrival of the ‘Windrush generation’. It brings together a range of essays in different formats by artists and art historians on topics and methods that have been central to the AHRC‐funded Black Artists and Modernism project from which it emerges. In particular, the introduction centralizes the lack of attention paid to the material and conceptual nature of artworks made by Black British artists, and asks how a reappraisal of their work can contribute to an expanded understanding of modernism. Re‐evaluating David Medalla's participatory artwork A Stitch in Time (1967–72), which originated in the late 1960s but has since taken on multiple lives in various locations across the globe, we consider why and how it continues to be occluded from orthodox narratives of conceptual art.

Stateside Perspectives on Black British Artists

Art HistoryVolume 44, Issue 2 p. 435-441 Book Review Stateside Perspectives on Black British Artists Richard Hylton, Richard HyltonSearch for more papers by this author Richard Hylton, Richard HyltonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 April 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12567Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume44, Issue2April 2021Pages 435-441 RelatedInformation

Jade Montserrat’s Fugitive Traces and Earth-Splattered Bodies

This article discusses the Scarborough-born Black British artist Jade Montserrat, interrogating her multimedia work in the light of the history of slavery and Black British presence, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. It looks specifically at the video works Clay and Peat Bog, discussing them in the context of their relation to Black presence in the North and the history of Black agency including new information about runaway slaves. The watercolour Toes and the installation piece No Need for Clothing are discussed in these terms as well, while the latter is used also to describe how charcoal traces from the work illuminate the physical cost of the work on Black bodies. The article uses theoretical work by Edouard Glissant, Paul Ricoeur, Michael Rothberg, Katherine McKitterick, Ian Baucom, and Hannah Arendt, as well as the context of Black British history, to help illuminate the multiple meanings the work engenders.

Dance, Diaspora and the Role of the Archives: A Dialogic Reflection upon the Black Dance Archives Project (UK)

The Black Dance Archives project collected materials that record the activities of black British artists who created and performed dance predominantly in the later years of the twentieth century. Through the form of a dialogue we bring the perspective of the dance producer who led the project together with a more academic interest in the potential of the materials collected to contribute to dance research. Our shared reflections reveal how a focus on archiving the work of dance artists of diasporic heritage emphasises that dance, as a form of intangible cultural heritage, is particularly vulnerable to becoming lost to future generations. This leads to reflections upon the role of dance archives within the context of post-colonial Britain that brings to the fore some of the complexities of the archival process and the significance of how this project resulted in materials being dispersed across different institutions.

New Directions in Black British Art History

This article discusses the changing nature of art history when it comes to black British artists and suggests that such history has perhaps moved away from existing to instead correcting or addressing the systemic absences of such artists from British art. This is typified by Rasheed Araeen’s 1989 exhibition The Other Story, the first major attempt to create a broad black British art history, and several other not dissimilar, exhibitions. The article also considers what changes to the fortunes of a small number of black British artists might be deduced from the awarding of honors by the queen and the extension of membership in the Royal Academy to a handful. The article draws attention to the ways in which major London galleries such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Serpentine, and the Whitechapel have, over the course of the past two decades, hosted the first main-space solo shows of black British artists’ work. With so much having happened to limited numbers of black British artists, this introduction suggests that burgeoning scholarship on these and other artists is timely, and that the articles assembled for this issue of Nka are a reflection of this increased attention. Among its concluding considerations are the ways in which much of this new scholarship emanates from US rather than from British universities. Finally, the article urges a “rescuing from obscurity” of important pioneering texts on black British artists.

Eugene Palmer and Barbara Walker

In Britain, black artists are arguably receiving the most sustained level of attention in a generation, from several historical exhibitions and international conferences to academic-based research initiatives and acquisitions by prestigious national museums. While offering artists a certain level of exposure, such initiatives have tended to privilege institutional agendas rather than the very artistic practices they purport to endorse. The paucity of genuine exhibition opportunities and significant publishing are factors that continue to bedevil a wider selection of black British artists. This article focuses on two specific exhibitions and artists: Eugene Palmer’s Didn’t It Rain (2018) and Barbara Walker’s Sub Urban: New Drawings (2015), both organized at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK. The author stresses the contrasting relationship to photography that each artist pursued in the making of their respective bodies of work and argues for a more engaged assessment of practice. The works of these artists deserve to be recognized for their fascinating and singular contributions to contemporary art practices.

Black circus performers in Victorian Britain

ABSTRACTThe role and importance of Black British artists in the nineteenth-century British circus have yet to be fully explored. By contextualising and bringing together key biographies and material on People of Colour who operated in travelling circuses a wider examination of their contrasting fortunes and experiences can be discussed. The British and American circus tradition traversed different but overlapping histories and should not be seen as one economic and societal concept. The experiences of Black performers in the United Kingdom and Europe were markedly different to those operating in the United States; this research seeks to understand the complex societal changes and contexts that operated on both sides of the Atlantic that influenced the performance context in which African-Americans and Black British performers and those of African descent experienced and aspired to be successful.

A UK–US “Black Lexicon of Liberation”: A Bibliography of African American and Black British Artists, Artworks, and Art-Making Traditions

The Western canon of art history exerts a stranglehold that generates almost insurmountable problems for artists and audiences of Black art. It is shaped by gatekeepers who are committed not only to deciding which art is studied and which artists are worthy of inclusion but also to controlling the images and image-making traditions in ways that are structured in dominance. African diasporic artists have mobilized art-making traditions in an individual and collective fight for “a new visual language” that destabilizes and demythologizes any and all such prescription in definitions, theories, and ways of seeing. But at the heart of any and all difficulties in doing justice to them and their struggle is the very real problem of accessing their artworks, artist statements, exhibition histories, and biographical materials. Working with artists, artists’ estates, and galleries over the past few years, I have put together a bibliography for the benefit of researchers, consisting of artists’ archives, websites, repositories, exhibition histories, statements, interviews, and criticism. Conceiving of this compilation as a weapon in the arsenal of social justice, I have assembled this bibliography as a tool for artists and audiences who are dedicated to heeding the rallying cry of African American painter Winfred Rembert as he insists that we all must go “back into the battleground.”

Performances, Acknowledgments, and Dinner: Closing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration

Performances, Acknowledgments, and DinnerClosing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration Dagmawi Woubshet (bio), Charles Henry Rowell, Rizvana Bradley (bio), Nathaniel Mackey (bio), Joshua Bennett (bio), Howard Dodson (bio), and Ben Okri (bio) The closing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration included the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Awards, closing remarks by Howard Dodson and Ben Okri, and musical performances by Carole Strong Thompson, Robert Reid, Hermine Pinson, and Harris Simon. WOUBSHET: I conducted an interview with Dr. Rowell at the Goethe-Institut in Addis Abba back in 2009, a year before the Callaloo Conference in Addis in 2010. I asked him, foolishly, “Dr. Rowell, how do you keep up with the literary trends of the day so that the journal keeps current?” Without skipping a beat, he replied, “We don’t have to keep up since we set the trend.” [Laughter] Foolish question, wise answer. Callaloo has been setting the standard for the past forty years, and in the process has forever changed the American and English literary canon. It has done so by prizing rigor, experimentation, what Greg Pardlo calls “radical individuality,” and also our collective ideals of justice, of freedom, and of beauty. Dr. Rowell, we treasure you, we love you, and we thank you for being our standard-bearer. Please, I was going to say “raise your glass” but raise your hand to Charles Rowell. I’d like to invite to the podium the Editor of Callaloo, Dr. Charles Henry Rowell. [Applause] ROWELL: We also honor the people who have been setting trends in various forms of art in literature, in literary criticism, in fiction writing, and in visual art. That’s what we’re going to do tonight. First, we will honor Frank Bowling for his lifetime achievement in visual art. Rizvana will not only speak about him, but she will accept his award. He is not able to be with us this evening. BRADLEY: Thank you so much, Dr. Rowell. It is a great honor to speak about Frank Bowling’s work, as I’ve also had the honor of teaching his work in many of my courses in art history and visual studies. Frank Bowling’s paintings have been exhibited widely and internationally. His selected solo shows have included the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and a touring retrospective in the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It’s worth noting as well that in 2017 the Haus der Kunst in Munich will present Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi, a comprehensive survey of large-scale paintings. Frank Bowling, Order of the British Empire, was born in 1936 in Guiana and moved to London in 1953, where his artistic career began shortly after his arrival at the Royal College of Art. He started his career as a figurative painter and then moved to abstraction and became involved in the British pop movement in the 1950s and [End Page 197] 1960s. His first solo exhibition, Image in Revolt, was hosted the year Bowling graduated at the Grabowski Gallery in London, and he decided to move to New York in 1966, as Stuart Hall noted in a very well-known essay about Black British artists published in the 1980s. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967. Bowling’s paintings began to turn to abstraction, the field in which his contributions were to be most significant, and he was frequently visited by the art critic, Clement Greenberg. His series of quasi-abstract color fields, overlaid with stenciled images of maps of Australia, South America, and Africa, are his best known works, in which he experimented with the possibilities of paint. It has been noted that Bowling’s legacy concerns his innovations with new process within his paintings. It should also be noted that he developed a special mechanical apparatus, which tilted the canvas so he could pour paint on it, and that allowed him to create what we now know as his famous and iconic poured paintings. I’m very happy today to be able to speak about his work very briefly and his contribution to contemporary art, and I’m honored to accept this award on his...

Black, Queer, Dandy: The Beauty Without Whom We Cannot Live

Taking seriously (and for granted) the playful perversity of blackness, “Black, Queer, Dandy” examines the black dandy archive’s encounter with Oscar Wilde. Looking to his precursor, arch and witty eighteenth-century “dandy in black” Julius Soubise, and his heir, sardonic black British artist Yinka Shonibare, this essay suggests that Wilde’s caricature as a black(face) minstrel dandy on his visit to America in the 1880s was both a compliment and an insult. Wilde as black dandy, and/or the black dandy in association with Wilde, attempted to associate the aesthete with an apish blackness and black people with a perverse foreignness. In the figures of Soubise and Shonibare, these insults are turned into a fabulous, subversive queerness productive of both nurture and death.

No More “Poisonous, Disrespectful, and Skewed Images of Black People”: Barbara Walker’s Louder Than Words

Black British artist Barbara Walker works across multiple narrative series to create hard-hitting dramatic tableaux in which she does powerful justice to the psychological, physical, emotional, cultural, social, and imaginative realities of lives as lived by black women, men, and children, both within the United Kingdom and across the African diaspora. Answering her own question “Where is the black presence?,” she creates self-reflexively experimental and politically radicalized bodies of work in which she dramatizes the invisibilized and misrepresented lives of black subjects. Creating multilayered and multireferential bodies of work in which she not only questions problematic representations of “Africa and its peoples” but also rejects the centuries-long stranglehold of “poisonous, disrespectful, and skewed images of black people,” Walker fuses personal autobiography, family testimony, and scholarly research to bear witness to her status as a contemporary history painter. Coming to grips with the imaginative, political, and aesthetic force of one of her many series, I examine Louder Than Words to trace Walker’s visual and textual resistances to the intersecting relationships between black masculinity and white mainstream stereotyping, criminalization, racial profiling, physical persecution, and psychological wounding. Refusing to sanitize or clean up white atrocities enacted against black subjects, Walker works with charcoal, pencil, and paint to create emotively charged portraits and landscape scenes in which she visualizes black- rather than white-centered histories, narratives, and memories. Creating images that are “louder than words,” Walker betrays her lifelong determination to give “voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.”

Stuart Hall: Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production

This article makes three specific and interrelated arguments. First, it argues that the power of Stuart Hall's pedagogy can be understood as having established a “third space” between political activism and academic research, a space that in the 1970s and early 1980s permitted the development of British cultural studies as an anti-elitist, theoretically informed approach to the field of culture, in particular popular culture. Second, I propose that as this space also opened itself up, starting in the late 1980s, to emerging young black and Asian British artists, and as it extended itself so as to engage with the work of key postcolonial theorists, a body of films and artworks appeared that expanded this space, maintaining the integrity of a practice that refuted the distinctions between high and low culture, in terms of aesthetics, and rhetorical address, and audiences. Third, I argue that the advent of neo liberal political culture in the United Kingdom cuts short the conditions of emergence, which had supported this group of artists, with all that this augurs for future generations of black and Asian artists today.

“The Burial and Unburial of Women”: <i>Thin Black Line(s)</i> and Tracing “Moments and Connections” in Black British Women’s Art Histories

As an artist who refuses categorically to shy away from both the “history of slavery” and the “contemporary grievances” arising from a white-dominated British art world, Lubaina Himid created a curatorial tour de force with her Thin Black Line(s) exhibition, on display at Tate Britain in 2011–2012. She adopted an array of signifying practices designed to riff off, reclaim, and revise the ideological biases and racialized blind spots of the Tate as a national institution. Himid’s long history of exhibiting Black British women’s work reflects her determination to fight against their “collective invisibility in the art world” as they “engaged with the social, cultural, political and aesthetic issues of the time” by undertaking a “conceptual reframing of the image of black and Asian women themselves.” Working with the spatial constraints of just one room in which to exhibit a decades-long history of Black British women artists and art making, Himid also had to rely upon numerous strategies to confront the obstacles presented by the Tate’s decision to mount Thin Black Line(s) not as a full-scale exhibition but as an “in-focus display.” This meant that it was not given as extensive a budget or as large an exhibition space as the Tate exhibitions appearing as part of their regular programming, and also not accorded the same levels of marketing, advertising, and scholarly attention. Himid set about solving these problems by engaging in diverse extra-curatorial practices and also by contesting and critiquing these limitations within the space itself. Himid’s self-reflexive strategies became a form of “guerrilla curating” as she engaged in a multitude of methods designed to critique, interrogate, and displace—if not outright reject—the challenges presented by the ideologically confining and tokenizing framing of the Tate as an exhibition space.

Stuart Hall and the Visual Arts

Contrary to the view that Stuart Hall's involvement in the visual arts was a supplement to his work in cultural studies and political analysis, this reflection addresses key continuities that connect his 1970s writings on racism and the media with the enlivening impact that the hybrid aesthetics put forward by black British artists, photographers, and filmmakers from the 1980s onward had on Hall's theoretically distinctive approach to diasporic questions of identity and ethnicity.

Travelling with Imoinda: Art, Authorship, and Critique

Travelling with Imoinda:Art, Authorship, and Critique Joan Anim-Addo (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Joan Anim-Addo Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014 [End Page 570] This article raises questions concerning art, authorship, and to a lesser extent, critique, specifically in relation to my opera libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name, written in 1997, given a first rehearsed reading in London in 1998 and first published in 2003 in Italy. Considering the scale of the art involved in this full-length work of music-theater, in terms of writing but also in relation to performance, I am interested to reflect upon what keeps those of us, black women especially, who find ourselves as artists woefully under-resourced in our diverse locations, nonetheless committed to developing that which seems at times to be an impossible practice. In the process of reflection, I borrow from the seminal Black British visual artists’ exhibition by black women curated by Lubaina Himid in 1985, the notion of “the thin black line.”1 For this purpose, the “thin black line” resonates ideas about resistance that retrospectively and disturbingly evoke 1980s Britain with its indifference or hostility to that which might yet be referred to as black arts practice. Addressing the question of commitment, I propose to consider desire in this context as perverse (in practical terms) and readily conjugated with commitment to highlight black arts practice as a perverse commitment. In this light, it is useful to be reminded that perverse commitment speaks also to the persistent, albeit largely dormant—and I contend still dominant—view of black arts practice in the diaspora. Notably, for example, Dame Janet Suzman, actor and ex-wife of Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the National Theatre, London, declared: “Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It’s in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare” (Alberge and Brown). Readily discerned in this statement is a belief system that can be traced back to Enlightenment ideas of G. W. F. Hegel who posited that the “Negro” stands outside culture and “the history of intellectual, technological, moral, and cultural progress,” which in Michelle Wright’s words is “guided by the Absolute of reason.” She also reminds us of Hegel’s comments on the slave trade, “that slavery was most likely the only way Africans would learn to appreciate freedom and thus develop into subjects” (Wright 8). Later pseudo-scientific thought only aggravated that discursive reality which the “Enlightenment” had begun to produce. Following such enlightened tradition, Suzman adds further that “[theatre] is not in their [black] culture” and clinches her explanation with “Just as their stuff is not in white culture.” She states categorically: “Theatre is a totally European invention, as is tragedy. Other countries don’t do tragedy. It’s an invention by the Greeks.” Should it not be considered perverse on the part of black artists to persist in writing for the theater—especially theater considered high art—in the face of such clear-cut cultural battle lines drawn by (white) cultural gatekeepers in the diaspora? [End Page 571] Suzman is quoted at length because she articulates freely the substance of that which must be resisted by black artists. I underscore, too, the black artist’s propensity towards resistance or the “thin black line” (Himid) which in effect functions as intense engagement with a process of re(member)ing, as June D. Bobb refers to it with reference to the poets Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Thus, to write Beloved, Toni Morrison has also felt the need to access the interior life of slaves via her imagination to bear witness to, in her words, “the interior life of people who didn’t write [their history] (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have it)” and to “fill in the blanks that the slave narrative left” (Morrison 183). In addition, perhaps especially within the diaspora, there are levels at which the compulsion to act upon what is known though not always acknowledged as “shared knowledge,” as Glissant writes of it, is overwhelming. About Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name My idea for Imoinda was...

Drawing maps: history and geography in contemporary black British art

For contemporary black British artists, history is a recurring and significant concept in their lives. This is the imperial and colonial history of the enslavement, exploitation, and oppression of non-white populations. Geography is conceptually twinned with history. European colonial enterprises necessitated the movement of people as well as goods across oceans and between continents. Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas were conquered, carved up, and mapped out by European powers. This geography is a legacy for those people whose ancestors and relatives were enslaved and/or displaced. It is equally important to those people directly affected by economic and political instability in their homelands, immigration, and/or racism. Artists Yinka Shonibare, Godfried Donkor, and Lubaina Himid appropriate centuries-old images and cultural as well as racial stereotypes to question accepted historical narratives with regards to black populations. Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, and Sokari Douglas Camp are more concerned with how history impinges upon them personally.