CHAPTER EIGHT

The Rise and Fall of
The Black-Art Gallery

By the early 1980s, strategising around the material needs of Black-British artists had evolved, even as debates about the nature of artists’ practice were likewise evolving. An astonishingly varied range of strategic responses to the needs of Black-British artists was developed during the course of the 1980s. These included large-scale open submission exhibitions organised by Creation for Liberation, and curatorial interventions made by artists themselves (for example, by Lubaina Himid), who were in effect acting as independent advocates for Black artists, in a range of environments. To such strategies can be added the hugely important one of creating and providing dedicated gallery spaces in which Black artists could have their work exhibited in a range of solo, group, open submission or themed exhibitions. During the 1980s, there were two such gallery spaces in London, The Black-Art Gallery, in Finsbury Park, across from the iconic Rainbow Theatre, and the Horizon Gallery, located in the heart of central London. The Black-Art Gallery, for much of its existence, worked with artists of African and Caribbean backgrounds, whilst the Horizon Gallery exhibited the work of artists of South Asian background.

These were not the only two gallery spaces in London in which the work of Black artists could be seen. As mentioned in Chapter Four, the Commonwealth Institute, located in the upscale shopping district of Kensington High Street, provided two exhibition spaces – the main gallery and a secondary exhibition area – in which Black artists, including those with secondary, rather than primary, links to the Commonwealth, could have their work seen. Elsewhere, in another highly fashionable district of central London, Covent Garden’s Africa Centre was an additionally hugely important venue that put a wide range of Black artists’ work within relatively easy reach of the general public and gallery-going audiences alike. If/when certain Africa Centre exhibitions were reviewed or highlighted in London listings magazine Time Out (and, while it existed, its rival, City Limits), the exhibitions in question were assured of an increased audience, often people for whom a Covent Garden detour presented no challenges whatsoever. Across London, the long-running October Gallery, in Holborn, had established itself as a faithful friend of artists such as Aubrey Williams, as well as artists with links to many different countries of the world, and those whose practice it termed transvangarde – that is, the trans-cultural avant-garde. But whilst such central London locations could be regarded as an asset, there were perhaps ways in which some regarded these locations as being something of a liability. That was certainly the opinion of Shakka Dedi, the founding director of The Black-Art Gallery, who opined that a gallery space for Black artists that was located in much closer proximity to recognisable Black communities and neighbourhoods was an altogether more credible prospect.

One significant characteristic of all of these venues, including The Black-Art Gallery and the Horizon Gallery, was a handy proximity to the underground ‘Tube’ train network. Simply put, these venues (notwithstanding Dedi’s cynicism) were all easy to get to. Another noteworthy exhibition space to establish itself around the needs of otherwise under-represented artists (and indeed, audiences) was the People’s Gallery, in Camden, North London, located pretty much alongside another legendary London performance venue, the Roundhouse.

Apart from the ways in which these London galleries contributed to an enhanced proximity between a range of Black artists and a range of audiences, their other significance was the extent to which they were able to often contribute to the documenting, and the historicising, of Black artists’ work. The catalogues that these galleries tended to produce may, for the most part, have been modest affairs, but they were nevertheless invaluable documents that did much to cement the notion that Black artists were, or could be, practitioners of note, merit and credibility. In addition to the catalogues produced, these galleries frequently circulated posters, opening view cards, press releases and other materials that served to draw greater attention to what Black artists were doing.

Born in the US in 1954, and given the name Melvyn Mykeal Wellington by his parents, (though eventually changing his name to the more Afrocentric Shakka Gyata Dedi), Dedi was a British poet, graphic designer, artist, and the first director of The Black-Art Gallery in North London. Dedi was one of the founders of the group responsible for establishing and running the gallery, the Organisation for Black Arts Advancement and Leisure Activities (OBAALA); subsequently, the world ‘Learning’ replaced the word ‘Leisure’. Located within the borough of Islington, the gallery received its core funding from Islington Borough Council. In the wake of the inner-city riots of 1980 and 1981 that disturbed both British society and Britain’s political leadership, certain types of attention were being paid to the somewhat fractious existence of significant sections of young Black Britain. A number of causes of the riots were advanced, though the causes which tended to dominate social commentary were Black youth’s complaints of unemployment, underemployment and poor prospects for social mobility, together with, perhaps most immediately pressing, persistent accusations of police harassment. The riots brought into sharp focus the extent to which so many young Black men were seemingly unable to escape the miserable clutches of unemployment, a situation made all the more wretched by educational under-achievement and the over zealous, somewhat lopsided policing they were subject to.

In the wake of the riots of the early 1980s, a particularly substantial establishment view emerged that the provision of social and cultural amenities could go some way to alleviate the disproportionate pressures Black youth were experiencing. Politicians with direct responsibilities for the wards, constituencies and boroughs that witnessed the most pronounced bouts of rioting gave their backing to a number of schemes and initiatives reflecting the view that, if the police could be somewhat reformed and if Black youth were given places to go and things to do, perhaps future rioting could be prevented. It was in this context that capital schemes were initiated in places such as St Paul’s, Bristol and Brixton, South London. The inner-city district of St Paul’s, Bristol, which was home to significant numbers of Caribbean migrants and their families, had witnessed a pronounced bout of rioting in 1980.¹ One commentator, speaking of what he called ‘reckless anger’, summarised the events as follows:

Sooner or later, some confrontation between the police and young blacks was almost inevitable. On 2 April 1980, a riot broke out in the St Paul’s district of Bristol with such ferocity that the police withdrew for four hours, leaving hundreds of exuberant black youths to an unrestrained display of reckless anger. Thirty-one people were reported injured.’²

Envisaged as a multi-purpose community resource, a St Paul’s neighbourhood community centre was built in the early 1980s, following the riots, for the primary purpose of providing social, recreational, educational and entertainment facilities to the inhabitants of St Paul’s and its surrounding areas.³ Brixton, likewise home to significant numbers of Caribbean migrants and their families, was also to witness significant bouts of rioting a year or so later, in 1981. And again, the institutional response was to include the provision of new social amenities.

The Brixton Recreation Centre, built following the Brixton riots, opened in 1985. It was in this context – of social provision for what were widely accepted to be disadvantaged communities – that Islington Borough Council made monies available to OBAALA to establish, maintain and run The Black-Art Gallery. Under Dedi’s directorship, a significant number of Black artists had their first London solo exhibitions, which came with catalogues, posters, opening view cards, press releases and so on. In that regard, the gallery did much to present the work of a wide range of artists of African background and origin in a professional environment. Early solo exhibitions included ones by Keith Piper, Donald Rodney and Sonia Boyce.

The gallery described itself as ‘a permanent venue for the works of Afrikan artists world-wide to be exhibited, seen, appreciated, shared, developed, bought, sold, etc.’. Beyond that, the gallery was to be ‘a permanent place to inspire you’ In its publications and other publicity material, the gallery made available notes on the history of the venture, written by Shakka Dedi:

Shakka Dedi and Eve-I Kadeena developed the original idea for the gallery in 1981. It came about as a response to the scarcity of space and lack of opportunities for Black artists to exhibit their work. It was recognised that there were very few venues where work by Black artists could be exhibited on a regular basis. The few venues that did exist, such as the Commonwealth Institute, Africa Centre, and at one time, the Keskidee Centre, were not well situated or suited to attract the audiences that many Black artists wished their work to reach. Some artists had tried to get their work exhibited in the established commercial art galleries – which are dominated by white, private enterprise. Owners of these establishments argue that they can only handle work that is commercially viable, and that the work produced by Black artists does not fall into this category. When they do display any interest, it is only in the stereotypical images of what they expect and believe Black art to be – i.e. palm trees, beaches, smiling fruit-women, etc. Others [other Black artists], aware of the way in which British society views Afrikan peoples and their culture, spared themselves the frustrations of seeking exhibition space in the private gallery arena.⁴

These notes by Dedi/OBAALA reflected a certain frustration on the part of a number of Black artists themselves of not having their work taken seriously by the gallery sector. Dedi alluded to the consequences of this neglect, before going on to posit that The Black-Art Gallery should be seen as being a positive development for Black artists and Black communities alike:

This lack of exhibiting venues and opportunities had the effect of stifling artistic expression – thus, preventing its development and progress. Many artists and potential artists ceased to produce work, having little motivation in this dead-end situation. OBAALA intends The Black-Art Gallery to act as a catalyst, and provide an incentive for artists to continue and to take up producing work. […] Importantly, the idea for The Black-Art Gallery evolved not simply as a response – albeit a positive one to a negative situation. It arose too out of the conscious recognition that Black people need to establish institutions and structures in Britain, which they are seen to administer and control – in order to best suit the needs and demands of the community.⁵

A passionate believer in the potential of ‘Black Art’ to be a driving, guiding and illuminating force in the lives and destiny of Black African (or, as he himself preferred, Afrikan) peoples, Dedi and his colleagues created one of the first British manifestos of Black Art, which appeared in the catalogues accompanying several early exhibitions at The Black-Art Gallery, beginning with Heart in Exile, the gallery’s opening exhibition in the autumn of 1983.⁶ From this point onwards, for the next six years, The Black-Art Gallery was in a position to impact on the ongoing debate about the nature, relevance and validity of ‘Black Art’ in Britain. OBAALA’s view of Black art was to some extent a reworking of the Black art manifestos offered ten to 15 years earlier by the African-American poets and prophets.

We believe that Black-Art is born and created out of a consciousness based upon experience of what it means to be an Afrikan descendant wherever in the world we are. ‘Black’ in our context means all those of Afrikan descent: ‘Art’; the creative expression of the Black person or group based on historical or contemporary experiences. It should provide an historical document of local and international Black experience. It should educate by perpetuating traditional art forms and by evolving and adapting contemporary art forms to suit new experiences and environments. It is essential that Black artists aim to make their art ‘popular’ – that is expression that the wide community can recognise and understand.⁷

One of the ways in which OBAALA strove to maintain what it considered to be a clear position was in the naming of the gallery. Whilst some artists and activists were starting to shy away from the term ‘Black Art’, OBAALA mounted a spirited defence of the term by calling their gallery space ‘The Black-Art Gallery’. This was not meant to be just a ‘Black’ gallery. It was meant to be a unique exhibition space, dedicated to the promotion of ‘Black-Art’. Capital B, hyphen, capital A. The gallery refused to use or recognise any variation of this. The first exhibition organised and presented at The Black-Art Gallery was Heart in Exile, which featured the work of 22 artists. All of the practitioners were of African-Caribbean origin. For almost a decade, the gallery maintained its ‘Afrikan-Caribbean’ position and no other artists were exhibited there. It was perhaps with good reason that Allan deSouza, a British South Asian artist, of East African background, made mention in an essay of ‘the rigidly Afrocentric nature of much Black art theory and practice.’⁸ In addition to the stringent criterion that ‘Black’ equates to African and African-Caribbean applied by The Black-Art Gallery, non-figurative or abstract painting was also conspicuously absent from the gallery exhibition programme; for fear that such work could be seen as being ‘elitist or pretentious’.

Like other exhibition spaces, The Black-Art Gallery was not without its critics and detractors. Nevertheless it established a reputation for showing a variety of interesting work, closely allied to the essentialist ‘Black-Art’ manifesto of the gallery and its director. Dedi had studied graphic design at Canterbury College of Art and was continuing to work as a graphic designer of film posters, record sleeves, and so on. In seeking to publicise the gallery’s exhibitions, Dedi brought into play his graphic design skills, serving his core belief that the work of the Black artist should at all times seek to educate (in the widest sense of the word), inform and strengthen the political and cultural identities of ‘Pan-Afrikan’ peoples. During his tenure, Dedi placed great emphasis on the exhibition poster, seeing it as not just a publicity tool, but a piece of work in its own right, embracing and reflecting his beloved principles of Black-Art. Dedi wanted his gallery’s exhibition posters to have a life of their own. Such was the success of his posters that it could, perhaps unkindly, be said that some of them were more successful than the exhibitions they sought to promote. He frequently designed the posters himself. But on occasion, he was happy for the artists themselves to take charge of this work.

Over the course of a decade of exhibition programming, The Black-Art Gallery hosted a wide range of exhibitions that, as mentioned earlier, took the form of solo, group, open submission or themed presentations. These included Conversations: An Exhibition of work by Sonia Boyce. Publicity for the exhibition stated:

Childhood memories of home and family life have formed the basis of many of Sonia’s creations. Concentrating on the Afrikan-Caribbean experience, there is little reference to ‘white society’ in her work. A constant theme running through Boyce’s work is the personal as public and the specific made general. The work is often full of warm inviting images beckoning the viewer to enter. Once comfortably inside, you are confronted with some of the harsher aspects of Black life. Sonia has recently acquired a studio space after much struggle. This is a major achievement for a Black artist outside the ‘old boys’ network which is usually closed to us. From her new studio she intends to explore new directions and subjects. The show at The Black-Art Gallery will be her first solo show.⁹

Though The Black-Art Gallery had, as mentioned, a number of detractors, it nevertheless had what it regarded as a core mission to nurture a community of practitioners. One such artist was Joseph Olubo, who exhibited in the gallery’s 1983 debut exhibition. Born in 1953, Olubo was aged 30 at the time of Heart in Exile, though he was to pass away seven years later, in April of 1990. As a way of marking Olubo’s premature passing, The Black-Art Gallery mounted ‘Ask me no Question…. I tell you no lie’, an exhibition of painting and sculpture which it described as being ‘Dedicated to the memory of Jo Olubo’.¹⁰ Amongst the gallery’s many other exhibitions were Sight•Seers: Visions of Afrika and the diaspora. This was one of a two part exhibition of ‘Afrikan Women’s Photography’ which featured Afia Yekwai, Elizabeth Hughes, Ifeoma Onyefulu, Jheni Arboine, and June Reid. By this time (late 1987), the gallery was somewhat obliged to acknowledge the recent, albeit relatively brief, escalation of the profile of a number of London’s Black artists, who had been exhibited in shows at the ICA (the Thin Black Line) and the Whitechapel Art Gallery (From Two Worlds). The Sight•Seers brochure referenced these exhibitions, but cautioned against complacency by flagging up seemingly perennial challenges:

Today, the work of Black artists has become slightly more visible, and with the recent breathtaking stream of interest being shown by white administered art establishments, Black-art in Britain has moved into a new phase. Issues of access to white venues, and the visibility of Black visual art share the discussion arena alongside others. Some [issues], such as the relevance and political nature of Black artists’ work were always part of the debate. Other [issues] are now being forcefully vocalised and fighting for space on the agenda. The even greater problem of Black women artists’ invisibility is one such issue being seriously challenged by Black women artists. Our policies and programme will seek to encourage and support these important debates and developments.¹¹

The gallery sought to present a varied programme of exhibitions that included woodburning, ceramics, and textiles. The Potter’s Art, an exhibition of ceramics by Chris Bramble, Jon Churchill, Tony Ogogo, and Madge Spencer,¹² was one such exhibition. Alongside this curatorial programme, the gallery sought to generate debates about aspects of the nature of Black artists and their practices. One such event, scheduled for Saturday 28 June 1986, was titled So Anything Goes?. This was Dedi’s attempt to re-assert his particular notion of the ways in which Black artists’ practice should, in effect, reflect and address a particular type of diasporic vision. The event was billed as ‘A Reasoning on Black Visual Arts Practise [sic] and Presentation’ and was described as ‘An opportunity for practicing Black artists and other members of the Black community to come together and discuss the issues of content, quality, audience and presentation.’¹³

21. The Black-Art Gallery, street view (1986).

It was not until 1992 that Asian artists were able to exhibit at The Black-Art Gallery. From the start of her time as director (taking over from Dedi in the early 1990s), Marlene Smith made it clear that she had little regard for the exclusively African/African-Caribbean remit of her predecessor Dedi. Her first exhibition was an emphatic rebuttal of The Black-Art Gallery’s previous agenda. The exhibition, called Colours of Asia,¹⁴ featured work by 11 artists of Asian origin. Inadvertently or deliberately, the Black-Art hyphen came to be dropped under Smith’s tenure, and the space was referred to as The Black-Art Gallery. It was the London venue for Zarina Bhimji’s exhibition I Will Always Be Here, on tour from the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.¹⁵ Smith also overturned Dedi’s unwritten employment policies and employed a staff member of South Asian origin to work at the gallery.

By the autumn of 1992, relations between The Black-Art Gallery and its principle funder, the London Borough of Islington, had deteriorated significantly. So much so that, according to the Weekly Journal newspaper, ‘The Finsbury Park-based gallery’s main funder Islington Borough Council suddenly axed its £92,000 grant in September [1992] creating protest from artists and supporters at its “underhand tactics”.’¹⁶ The story, titled ‘Black arts put on the shelf’, was written by Lorraine Griffiths and was front-page news in the Weekly Journal of Thursday 28 October 1992. A campaign was launched to keep the gallery open, but despite letters of support from directors and other senior staff of a number of galleries such as Camerawork, The Photographers’ Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Bluecoat Gallery, and Walsall Museum & Art Gallery, and letters of protest sent directly to Margaret Hodge (then Leader of Islington Borough Council, and currently a senior Labour Party politician), The Black-Art Gallery closed its doors for the last time in 1993.

Ultimately, the reasons for the demise of The Black-Art Gallery were multi-factored. The exhibition landscape for Black artists changed markedly during the decade in which the gallery operated. In 1983, exhibitions by Black artists in the full range of mainstream gallery spaces were still something of an exception and a rarity. In 1983, when The Black-Art Gallery first opened, none of the major survey exhibitions of Black artists’ work had yet taken place. The GLC had not yet begun its piecemeal engagement with Black artists and no major publications featuring these artists had yet been produced. By the late 1980s, Black artists’ work had been exhibited in major galleries such as the Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield and the Cornerhouse in Manchester, both regarded, at the time, as important national venues. Black artists had also featured in celebrated exhibitions at the ICA, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and the Hayward, all important London galleries. Exhibitions had also taken place at venues such as the Chisenhale Gallery, and Lubaina Himid had mounted a self-initiated venture, a one-off exhibition at a temporary space near Borough Tube station. Major touring exhibitions of Black artists’ work were taking place around the country. All this mid-to-late 1980s exhibition activity, and much more besides, meant that The Black-Art Gallery became, in time, only one of the spaces in which Black artists’ work could be seen.

During its decade of existence, The Black-Art Gallery had not cultivated (or had not been successful in cultivating) relations with the national funding body for the arts, the Arts Council. (Though the gallery did secure some funding from London Arts Board, the regional arts board for London.) Had the gallery secured revenue funding, or otherwise accessed Arts Council monies, its fate might have been somewhat different. Instead, when Islington Borough Council let it be known that its funding was to be summarily withdrawn, The Black-Art Gallery had, in effect, no friend or allies amongst the country’s funding bodies to which it could turn for support. By the early 1990s, the fabric of the gallery was looking decidedly shabby, as precious little money had been raised for the upkeep of the building on Seven Sisters Road, or precious little of the gallery’s budget had been spent on maintenance and refurbishment. The gallery looked tired.

The history of Black arts projects in the UK shows the vulnerability of such projects to the vagaries and/or prejudices of funding bodies. Generally speaking, when Black projects got into financial difficulties or otherwise fell out of favour with funders, their funding was withdrawn, forcing the projects to close or collapse. In contrast, when a number of ‘white’ arts projects ran into financial difficulties or experienced other potentially chronic problems, they were often bailed out or given financial reprieves.

There were other respects in which Black projects were susceptible to the vagaries of funders. By the early 1990s, the riots of the early and mid 1980s had already passed into history, and the Black presence in the country, and in London in particular, was assessing itself, and being assessed against other criteria, such as the brutal and horrific murder, in 1993, of the young Black Londoner Stephen Lawrence. In effect, the institutional and local governmental responses to the riots of the early to mid 1980s were a thing of the past. So much so, that many of the capital projects and other initiatives launched in the wake of the riots had, by the end of the decade, run into similar problems to those of The Black-Art Gallery. In short, the landscape had changed. A new institutional venture backed by the Arts Council, going by the acronym INIVA – the Institute of New International Visual Arts – was in its early ascendancy and was rapidly becoming the only game in town that purportedly catered to the notional needs of cultural diversity in the visual arts. For these reasons, and indeed others, The Black-Art Gallery effectively found itself, to use a chess analogy, in checkmate.

For several years, from the mid 1980s onwards, The Horizon Gallery distinguished itself as a substantial exhibition space, located in central London, in which visitors could expect to see work by practitioners of primarily South Asian background. The gallery was run by, and home to, a body known as the Indian Arts Council. The gallery hosted a number of important exhibitions by artists of South Asian background raised in the UK, including Sutapa Biswas: Recent Paintings, 17 June – 11 July 1987. Located at 70 Marchmont Street, in London’s West End, the Horizon Gallery offered a consistent programme of exhibitions which frequently came with modest, but nonetheless important, exhibition brochures.

By far the most important curatorial intervention made by Horizon Gallery came in early 1990, during the course of The Other Story exhibition on show at the Hayward. As mentioned in the Introduction, important and monumental though the exhibition was, it nevertheless elicited a number of critical responses that brought out into the open divergent and sometimes discordant voices. The most conspicuous critics were those who declined Araeen’s invitation to participate, fearing that to contribute to such an exhibition was tantamount to pigeon-holing themselves along constrained lines of ethnicity, race, cultural identity, and so on. The effective refusal of high-profile artists Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Kim Lim, Dhruva Mistry, and Veronica Ryan cast something of a shadow over the exhibition, and was seized on by certain critics as evidence or confirmation of the exhibition’s supposedly peripheral status. Amongst the exhibition’s sternest critics were those who charged that it overlooked or omitted significant women artists, particularly those of South Asian background, who were arguably conspicuous by their absence from the exhibition.

It was an attempt by the Horizon Gallery to address what it saw as The Other Story’s omissions that led the gallery to hastily organise a series of exhibitions that were, despite that haste, important curatorial interventions. The exhibitions were called In Focus and comprised four consecutive exhibitions, each one featuring work by four artists of South Asian background. Bhajan Hunjan, Chila Kumari Burman, Shanti Thomas, and Jagjit Chuhan were in the first of the exhibitions. Mumtaz Karimjee, Zarina Bhimji, Nudrat Afza, and Pradipta Das were in the second. Mali, Shaffique Udeen,¹⁷ Sohail, and Shareena Hill were in the third, and Suresh Vedak, Amal Ghosh, Prafulla Mohanti and Ibrahim Wagh were in the fourth and final show.¹⁸

The press release bristled with a certain indignation at the perceived failings of The Other Story and an apparently pressing need to address these shortcomings:

We have identified an urgent need to mount an exhibition in conjunction with the Hayward show, ‘The Other Story’. From our discussions with various Asian Artists, three distinct groups have emerged. These groups reflect different political and social realities, which are inevitably reflected in their art. The relationship between these artists, their work, their position in British society and the influences of their background and culture, is different, depending on the circumstances and reasons for living in Britain. These groups are: The older generation who came between 1950 to 1970, some of whom formed the Indian artists collective in 1964; to redress the lack of recognition in mainstream art in the West, the [second group is] Asians who were compelled to leave Africa and [the third group is] Asians born in Britain.

Additionally, in all three categories, but mainly in the final category, ‘Asians born in Britain’ are Asian women artists. This important group is not represented in the Hayward show.

The exhibitions are designed to give a representative view of the work of Asian artists living in Britain. […] The exhibition […] will consequently make a considerable contribution both to the exposure of Asian artists in Britain and the longer term documentation of their work.

It is an appropriate time to assess and analyse the input of Asian artists and to evaluate them in relation to main stream art practices.¹⁹

Hurriedly put together these exhibitions may have been, but they nevertheless represented by far the most important curatorial intervention made by Horizon Gallery. Whilst The Other Story drew large amounts of press attention, In Focus drew comparatively little. Artist Veena Stephenson wrote one of the most significant appraisals of the series of exhibitions:

The Horizon Gallery in London organised ‘In Focus’ in response to the more widely publicised exhibition, ‘The Other Story’, at the Hayward Gallery. Their response was not only swift but was achieved with minimal financial help from the usual funding bodies. The aim was to address some of the failings of the Hayward show and the result was a selection of work by sixteen South Asian artists spread over four consecutive exhibitions.

Particular emphasis was given to the women artists who comprise exactly half the exhibitors. All but one are in the first two shows – the significance of this arrangement, it seems, was to highlight the much talked about omission of South Asian women artists in the Hayward show. In fact, this was one of the main motivations for mounting this series of exhibitions.²⁰

When the Horizon Gallery closed in 1991, a well-located venue, dedicated to showing the work of artists with, frankly, limited exhibition options, was lost. Within a couple of years of the Horizon Gallery closing, The Black-Art Gallery, in Finsbury Park, also closed its doors for the final time, having had its funding withdrawn by Islington Borough Council. Whilst neither of these galleries were without their critics, for periods of about five and ten years respectively they provided exhibition opportunities for significant numbers of artists, albeit practitioners representing demarcated constituencies. Notwithstanding the subsequent establishment of Rivington Place, the gallery-based home to INIVA and Autograph, the closure of the Horizon Gallery and The Black-Art Gallery effectively meant that two particular venues were lost, and were never replaced.