Paul Mellon Centre: “Black Art” and British Art History

A talk by Elizabeth Robles which will draw on research from a British Academy funded research project entitled “Making Waves: Black Artists and ‘Black Art’ in Britain from 1962–82”, which maps the shifting formations of ‘black art’ that took shape before the constellation of artists, events and exhibitions that have come to be known as the British Black Arts Movement burst onto the British art scene in the early 1980s. It will look to the ways in which artists have configured notions of “black art” – what it is, who it’s for and what it might look like – in debates that came to life on the pages of journals, in exhibition catalogues, at conferences and, crucially, on gallery walls across the late twentieth century; from Frank Bowling’s series of interventions in Arts Magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s to seminal texts by Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chambers to key works by Marlene Smith and Maud Sulter.