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.

This article uses the monument to Giotto in Florence Cathedral, which shows him setting a mosaic, as the entry point into a discussion of Giotto as a mosaicist. It asks why his activity as a mosaicist has tended to be sidelined in the art-historical literature, despite the significance of the mosaic of the Navicella, much celebrated between the 14th and 17th centuries. It argues that mosaic-making was a significant art in 14th-century Rome and that Vasari’s Lives of the Artists traces an overlooked story of mosaics alongside that of painting.