Normal View Dyslexic View
Personal Reflection
Personal notes on the art of the African diaspora
Bernardine Evaristo*†
bernardineevaristo@gmail.com
Abstract
In this personal essay, I reflect on the how cultural shifts in the British art world establishment, have enabled black artists who came of age in the Eighties, to enjoy late career success. I’m particularly interested in the careers of black women, who have traditionally been more overlooked by their male counterparts. I start with my own desire to connect to my Nigerian/African heritage when I was a young woman, one who had grown up brainwashed by the colonial project, and talk about the changes I have witnessed since the Eighties. I interrogate the value placed on transnational artists with ancestral ties to Africa by the art establishment then and now, and how those artists who are currently exhibiting in major art galleries and museums are often showing work created decades ago. This begs the question, if not then, why now? The article arises from a British Academy Lecture delivered on 9 November 2023.
Keywords
blackwomenartartistsestablishmentAfricaBritishEightiesMany years ago when I was in my twenties, a friend stayed in my flat while I was away. On proud display was my purchase of an Akua’ba fertility doll of the Asante people of Ghana, a sculpture with a disc-shaped representation of a human head and stylised facial features. The original purpose of these talismans was as a symbol of fertility, with the belief that they had the power to bring blessings in the form of children. Although I wasn’t interested in having children, I imagined this sculpture representing what I thought of as creative fertility. I found it beautiful, interesting, life-enhancing and, of course, benign. Not so to my dear white friend. When I returned home, I found that she had turned the sculpture to face the wall. I realised that she must have been spooked by it, that to her it probably evoked some kind of malevolent spirit. This, she would have gleaned from watching the countless Hollywood films of old that misinterpreted and invented African cultural practices and beliefs that were seen as malign. Perhaps she thought it was going to hex her, and she’d end up being thrown into a cauldron by natives and offered up to the evil witch doctor as a human sacrifice—in Islington, no less.
I was quietly affronted by my friend’s response to my sculpture. We had both grown up in Britain brainwashed by the imperial project against recognising the complexity of the thousands of ethnicities and cultures on the vast African continent. Instead, Africa was portrayed as homogenously uncivilised and barbaric. Because I was seen as an outsider in Britain due to how I looked, even though I was, in fact, as British as they come: born, raised, educated, culturally inculcated, I had begun to turn to Africa for validation. Therefore, unlike my unreconstructed friend, I had been actively seeking to educate myself against the centuries-deep racist conditioning that held that Africa had no culture or history worth investigating. I was on a journey to positively reinforce my connection to the continent from which my Nigerian father had migrated in 1949.
My immersion project involved spending the decade of my twenties in the Eighties reading books by black women, alongside African and Black British history books. I watched documentaries such as The Africans: A Triple Heritage, by Dr Ali Mazrui, which explored the continent from an insider’s perspective rather than through a white supremacist colonial lens. I tried to learn my father’s Yoruba language and I made my first trips to Africa, often picking up art work and accessories for my personal pan-African adornment, such as leather bracelets with cowrie shells, Queen Nefertiti silver earrings, Kente cloth head wraps. I was discovering the cultures of Africa and its diaspora through which I was constructing a sense of self that could navigate British and European societies with the knowledge that through my father’s heritage, as a bi-racial person, I was connected to equally important societies and histories. This re-education, this foundational grounding, has informed my critical viewpoint ever since.
As an avid art-gallery-lover since my twenties, I was always aware that artists from Africa and the African diaspora were barely visible in British galleries. The male hegemony of the visual art world—those who taught, bought, funded, exhibited, critiqued and nurtured artists—was reflected in the majority-male artists who were supported and spotlighted. Given the patriarchal historical context of art history, this is understandable, but once we look at the wider demographics of artists from the middle of the 20th century onwards, it raises difficult questions. Various reports have evidenced the gender imbalance in the art world, such as the Cambridge University report (Murray Edwards College 2022) that revealed that only 7% of art in the collections of top public museums are by women. So if women barely got a look-in in the hallowed spaces of the great galleries, what about people and women of colour?
Yet I have to acknowledge that times have been rapidly changing of late, and it’s been an incredible pleasure to witness the invigorated careers of several black artists who have been around for a long time but not received their dues, as well as discovering relative newcomers who are not facing the same obstacles their older peers had to overcome. There are now a sizeable number of artists from transnational backgrounds with origins in Africa achieving prominence with their unique cultural aesthetics and practices. No longer the few, but the many. This moment feels historic, even epoch-defining.
I think of my generation of artists whose work I first saw in the Eighties, such as Sonia Boyce, who represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2022. Not only was she the first black woman to achieve this honour, but she also won the prestigious Golden Lion prize for Best National Participation. Or Lubaina Himid, the first black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017, but only after they shifted the age limitation from under 50 to any age. This was in recognition of the fact that what is new and exciting doesn’t necessarily correlate with ageist restrictions. Age discrimination has always held the arts industries back, along with the belief that if you don’t achieve major success or make a big splash when you are coming of age, in your twenties, perhaps thirties, then you’re past it, and you will forever be consigned to the slag heap of insignificance, to be seen as a ‘minor’ artist, even a failure. I broke through when I won the Booker Prize at the age of sixty, forty years after I started writing professionally. That wasn’t supposed to happen, and indeed it didn’t happen for a black woman novelist until the stars aligned for me.
In 2022, I wrote an article for The Guardian on the artistic triumph of older black women, because so many of us were having the kind of success that would have been unthinkable when we were young women forty years ago. The artist Claudette Johnson is a case in point. Her career began in the early Eighties when I also first encountered her figurative drawings in black women’s art exhibitions curated by Lubaina Himid. In 2023, Johnson had her first major exhibition in London, Presence, at the prestigious Courtauld Gallery where she joined a pantheon of artists including Degas, Gauguin, Manet and Renoir. The establishment had finally cottoned on to art that we black women had always valued as profoundly impactful images of ourselves, our sisters, our friends, mothers, our community. Her black female figures are unapologetic, self-contained, do not fit into any reductive parameters, and do not exemplify a Eurocentric concept of a beauty that is defined either by its colourist approximation to whiteness or a darker-skinned exoticism.
In 1990, Johnson expressed her thesis forcefully:
I am a Blackwoman and my work is concerned with making images of Blackwomen. Sounds simple enough—but I’m not interested in portraiture or its tradition. I’m interested in giving space to Blackwomen’s presence. A presence which has been distorted, hidden and denied. I’m interested in our humanity, our feelings and our politics; some things which have been neglected …
I am curious as to the factors that contribute to how we perceive art and the value we place on it. What are the challenges when artists draws on cultural backgrounds that are not seen as important, because the gate-keeping tastemakers have not studied, or are not knowledgeable, or are not interested in the context or nature of the work, which perhaps has little relevance to them because it falls outside the contemporary trends they are drawn to, and contexts of greatness based on scholarship established centuries ago. To be ‘seen’ has become a cliché, but it also speaks to a history of invisibility in an interconnected network of hierarchies, prejudices, infrastructures and personal preferences. I will always remember that back in the olden days of my youth, the not-so-golden-Eighties, very few people other than ourselves were interested in black people, especially women, in the arts, and there was certainly no interest in the multiplicity of our creative offerings, or the heterogeneity between us, something I explored in my novel, Girl, Woman, Other, with its twelve, wide-ranging, primarily black female co-protagonists.
As someone who loves looking inside other people’s homes, either in person, when I get invited and can snoop around (I’m a novelist, it’s research!) or through the numerous TV programmes and magazines that focus on people’s homes: the buying, improving, or simply showing off, I’ve noticed that people tend to stay in their racialised lanes when it comes to the visual imagery they choose as decoration. It seems to me that the art we surround ourselves with in our domestic settings tends to mirror our cultural backgrounds and interests. This isn’t a value judgement, but an observation, perhaps an obvious one. Certainly, the art I’ve chosen to surround myself with tends to originate from Africa and its diaspora—a reflection of my background and preoccupations. From our domestic setting to the public galleries, how much do our personal preoccupations influence how we value the broad church of contemporary art in particular—whom we notice, whom we feel driven to support, whom we buy, whom we exhibit? As a mere punter and occasional pundit, I do not hold sway in the art world. If it were otherwise, then the combination of my personal taste with my power would have elevated Johnson’s art a lot earlier.
Many of us in the arts circles of the Eighties were just as uncompromising as Johnson in finding our own way and drawing our inspiration from influences that stood outside of the Western canons we couldn’t relate to, and which didn’t include us, whether it was literature, film, music, dance, the dramatic arts. As a theatre-maker in my twenties, I developed a visceral aversion to most mainstream theatre because it was typically about a Britain that neither acknowledged its black and Asian presence nor cast us in its plays. My focus was on creating black British women’s theatre. The company I co-founded, Theatre of Black Women (1982–8), with two fellow students from drama school, Patricia St. Hilaire and Paulette Randall, was an act of creative resistance and self-determination in a society where we were supposed to be content occupying peripheral, negligible spaces. Among my generation of creatives who emerged in the Eighties, many of whom I knew then, are those now being celebrated as leading artists. This includes Sir John Akomfrah (knighted in 2023 and Britain’s Venice Biennale representative 2024), Sonia Boyce, Chila Burman (whose fluorescent light sculptures and installation adorned the façade of Tate Britain in 2020), Veronica Ryan (winner of the 2022 Turner Prize) Sir Isaac Julien (knighted in 2022), Hew Locke, Zak Ové, and Ingrid Pollard (Turner shortlist 2022). Along with Himid and Johnson, it’s heartening to see them all flourishing, with major exhibitions, prizes, commissions and books about their work, in this different cultural climate to the one that existed forty years ago, or even thirty years ago, when it seemed that only Chris Ofili and later Yinka Shonibare were spotlighted. Other creatives from this era include the writer Jackie Kay, who was the Scottish Makar1 (2016–21), and the composer Shirley Thompson, who composed for the King’s Coronation.
The familiar argument frequently deployed as a defence mechanism and deflection from engaging with genuine issues of inequality and unequal access in the arts, is that the work isn’t or wasn’t good enough. Then how do we explain why many of Claudette Johnson’s drawings on display in the Courtauld Gallery were created over forty years ago? Likewise with Faith Ringgold whose first solo exhibition in a major European gallery occured at the Serpentine in 2019—at the great age of eighty-nine. Once you see her shockingly radical and subversive paintings and quilts that were displayed from the Sixties, you understand why she was never taken up by the art establishments of an entire continent. Similarly, Frank Bowling, who emigrated to Britain from British Guiana in 1953, and had his first retrospective, at Tate Britain in 2019, at the age of eighty-five.
The question is: if not then for Johnson, Ringgold, Bowling and others, why now? Same artists, much the same art, but different attitudes to the value placed on them by those with the power to bestow largesse and build careers. Yet one of the most egregious criticisms of a more inclusive culture, the long overdue widening of participation, perception and perspective, is that it signifies a dropping of standards. This is a predictable, knee-jerk response declaimed by those who are averse to power sharing, who believe their opinions alone, predicated on exclusionary, establishment parameters, define concepts of quality and greatness, and who steadfastedly refuse to engage with other points of view or in a dialectical debate.
How high is the 'bar' anyway? When I visited the shortlist exhibition for the Turner Prize at Tate Modern in 2001, I had no idea that a light bulb flicking on and off formed part of the artwork by Martin Creed that went on to win this most renowned of UK art prizes. It was a witty, irreverent, intentionally artless two-finger salute to the establishment art world. The jury lauded his audacity and rewarded him for the questions it raised about the nature of art itself. But my money that year was on Isaac Julien who also made the shortlist, and I was pissed off that he didn’t walk off with the trophy with his original and stunningly poetic video installations,Vagabondia and The Long Road to Matzalan. Julien has always pushed the frontiers of art with a creativity that intersects multiple fields and interests with a subtle obliquity, versatility and courageous engagement with blackness and sometimes queerness. His substantial art video installations are always mesmerising visions and a revisioning from a radical black (British) and global citizen perspective. I’ve been following his work since seeing his early Eighties films with Sankofa Film & Video Collective which he co-founded. Yet again, his first major retrospective, What Freedom Means to Me, only took place in 2023, at Tate Britain.
I admire the uncompromising stance of the veteran artists who stayed the course, who never gave up or who gave up but returned to artmaking, as was the case with Claudette Johnson, who took a long break. How do you stick to your practice when those who decide what kind of art has value, think that yours has little or none?
I was struck by something Johnson said in a 2023 Observer interview. The journalist wrote,
She is about to move to a new, larger studio that will allow her to work at greater scale. She indicates a large ‘canvas’ made of bark from Uganda that she has been preparing but does not have the space to work on. ‘I can’t stand back here more than 8ft and that doesn’t allow me to see the scale of that,’ she says. The new studio—‘a dream come true’—will allow that possibility.2
It made me think about the practicality of art-making; about who has access to the larger studio spaces that enable ambitions to be realised at a grand physical scale. Who gets to work in cavernous rooms, converted barns, empty warehouses; in the kind of spaces that encourage the dreamy, undulating overspill of an unfettered, infinitesimal imagination? This is what financial success and institutional support provides, along with teams of assistants and technical and manufacturing expertise, as opposed to the solitary artist working at their kitchen table or in a tiny prison cell of a studio.
Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall gallery runs the length of this formidably-sized former power station at 9 metres high and 155 metres long. It cannot fail to impress as you enter the building and walk down the sloping entranceway. I’ve been going to see exhibitions in the Turbine since it opened in 2000 with the first commission, a Louise Bourgeois installation featuring her unforgettable monster spider, Maman, which was large enough to walk underneath. As a woman of nearly ninety, she was an inspired choice.
However, the first black woman artist to be awarded this gargantuan gallery was the American, Kara Walker. The centrepiece of her 2019 installation was a thirteen-foot fountain, Fons Americanus. This wonderfully weird edifice, populated with human caricatures and animals, layered with gruesome legacies and an encyclopaedia of American, British and African references, was in forceful and imaginative argument with the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. When the exhibition closed, the fountain was demolished. (If only they’d told me, I’d have scavenged a memento.)
In 2023, the first black man commissioned to work in the Turbine was the Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui. His installation, Behind the Red Moon, consisted of his trademark fabric hangings made from thousands of recycled bottle-tops flattened and stitched together. The massive, phenomenal hangings, drawing on transatlantic histories and migration routes, managed to dominate this humungous space and fill it with his vision.
Of course, there is the artist’s intention and then there is the viewer’s interpretation. We see what we see, irrespective of official descriptions. All art can be viewed through a political lens—the political prismatic—and it’s interesting that the scale of the Turbine Hall has not been lost on the political nature of these two artists; they did not waste the opportunity to make grand and thought-provoking enquiries. The sheer scale of supersized sculptures and installations foster a sense of wonderment. Surely even the most cynical art connoisseur would feel an out-of-body sense of wonder as they look up at the dramatic fabrics of El Anatsui—their crushed bottle-tops glittering as they catch the light.
Sticking to the supersized, the British-Trinidadian artist, Zak Ové’s spectacular sculpture, The Mothership Connection, was installed as part of Frieze London 2023 in Regents Park. Having seen photographs of it, I felt as if I was making a pilgrimage from west London where I live to see this 9-metre Afro-Futurist totem-cum-rocket ship. Constructed out of engineered materials, with re-invented and repurposed African and Caribbean motifs, this spacecraft was illuminated with the most dazzling colours and lights. It looked strikingly incongruous standing in the sedate and manicured green landscape of this London park, as if about to launch into the afro-sphere, to take us where no person has gone before. It was such a joy-inspiring artwork, its name taken from the 1970s album, Mothership Connection, by the Parliament-Funkadelic music collective. Other sculptures located nearby included, to my amusement, a giant afro-pick by Hank Willis Thomas, stuck at an angle into the ground, a black power fist and peace sign wittily integrated into its design.
This is very much the era of the phantasmagorical in the art of the African diaspora. Curator Ekow Eshun’s group exhibition, In the Black Fantastic, at the Hayward Gallery in 2022, was a mind-blowing display of imaginative feats by artists who eschew the realistic for the futuristic, imagining possible black futures through different media and drawing on existing mythologies. Artists included Nick Cave, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Rashaad Newsome, Chris Ofili, Lina Iris Viktor and Kara Walker. While Hew Locke’s solo exhibition The Procession (2022) at Tate Britain, was an astonishing carnivalesque parade of surreal and grotesque people, animals and objects though which he offered reflections on money and power, history and society.
When I began this essay, my intention was to demonstrate how black art is for everyone. But in the writing process, it has become, as is usually the way with me, something of an activist discourse.
I look forward to a time when there are more black curators, creators, art critics and academic cognoscenti, because when black people are active in these fields, they bring very different kinds of knowledge, preoccupations, expectations and interpretations to them.
Other than Ekow Eshun, among the crop of brilliant new curators changing the game in the UK are the art historian, Aindrea Emelife who is Curator of Contemporary & Modern, at the Museum of West African Art, (MOWAA) in Nigeria. She curated two London exhibitions in 2023 including the seminal Black Venus: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture, at Somerset House. And there is Osei Bonsu, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, who curated their outstanding African photography exhibition, A World In Common (2023).
Last year I met a young BA History of Art Cambridge graduate (class of 2021), Alayo Akinkugbe, who told me how frustrated she had been at the whiteness of the curriculum on her course, with few exceptions. She set up the Instagram platform @ablackhistoryofart in her second year so that she could ‘self-educate and not leave university with an understanding of art history that was 90% white’. Still only twenty-three, I admire her confidence and chutzpah and I am encouraged by someone in her early twenties who has decided to be proactive at redressing the balance and creating such a necessary platform.
I’m going to finish by talking about the American artist, Simone Leigh, who represented the USA at the Venice Biennale in 2022. Like Sonia Boyce, she was also the first black woman to represent her country, and like Sonia Boyce, she also picked up a Golden Lion. I went to the Biennale to see the prize-winning exhibitions of both artists in situ. I’ve been following and admiring Boyce’s art since the Eighties, but Leigh was relatively new to me. I’d seen photographs of her giant statue of a black woman, Brick House, which had been commissioned for the ‘High Line Plinth Project’ in New York in 2019. It looked utterly magnificent and could be seen from the street, a symbol of black womanhood serenely presiding over the city. The main sculpture in Leigh’s Venice show was situated at the entrance to the American pavilion. Named Satellite, it was a female figure about 24-feet high, with breasts and a satellite-shaped head. It looked like a giant version of an Akua’ba doll, except this one had four legs which were bolted into the ground—unmoveable.
It was a colossal African icon, unavoidable for everyone who walked by, whether they liked it, or were spooked by it, or not. It had a devotional quality for me, inviting worship of a goddess spirit, radiating a consciousness of African women out across the Biennale, beyond its perimeters, across undulating swirling canals of historic Venice where Africans have lived from at least the 1400s, across Europe, free and enslaved, calling us—the ancients and the moderns—to a secular prayer.
References
AdamsT. (24 September 2023), “‘I Thought We’d Stormed the Citadel, But We Hadn’t”: Claudette Johnson on Blazing a Trail for Black Artists—and the Joy of Reigniting her Career’, The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/sep/24/claudette-johnson-presence-blk-art-group-retrospective-courtauld-artist-interview
EvaristoB. (2019), Girl, Woman, Other (London, Penguin).
EvaristoB. (28 April 2022), “‘They are Totally Smashing it!” Bernardine Evaristo on the Artistic Triumph of Older Black Women’, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/apr/28/bernardine-evaristo-on-the-artistic-triumph-of-older-black-women
JohnsonC. (1990), “‘Claudette Johnson: Pushing Back the Boundaries”, exhibition catalogue’. Rochdale Art Gallery.
MazruiA. (1986), The Africans: A Triple Heritage, film (BBC, WETA).
Murray Edwards College (2022), “‘Visible Women: Arts and Gender”, Detailed Report (Cambridge, Murray Edwards college, University of Cambridge)’. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/MEC%20Visible%20Women%20report_FINAL.pdf
1
Poet Laureate.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a20
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 373
Article download count: 10
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Evaristo, B. (2024), ‘Personal notes on the art of the African diaspora’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a20 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a20Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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