CHAPTER NINE

The Emergence of Black Women Artists:
Arguments and Opinions

During the period of the early to mid 1980s the distinct, specific entity of the ‘Black woman artist’ emerged alongside the more general (and non-gender-specific) presence of the ‘Black’ artist. By 1986, the impact and importance of this development was widely acknowledged, resulting, temporarily at least, in the significant raising of the profile of Black women artists such as Sonia Boyce and Maud Sulter, by sections of the art establishment. In 1988 Sonia Boyce achieved the distinction of being the first British-born Black artist to have had a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery¹ and Maud Sulter was awarded the Momart Fellowship at Tate Gallery, Liverpool in 1990–1991. In an overview of Black visual arts practice in Britain, from the 1950s through to the mid 1980s, Errol Lloyd noted that ‘Women are now stepping out, and for the first time in Britain black women artists are exhibiting together, as well as exploring issues of common concern and creativity together, without the sometimes stifling intervention of men.’²

This emergence was centred on three particular exhibitions organised and curated by Lubaina Himid which signalled the newly conspicuous presence of Black women artists. These were the first exhibitions of Black women artists in Britain to be labeled as such. The first of these exhibitions was Five Black Women Artists,³ which took place at the Africa Centre, a venue that had increasingly come to be used by a newer, younger generation of practitioners whose links with the African continent most frequently existed via the diaspora. The exhibition featured Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Houria Niati, and Veronica Ryan. Whilst Boyce and Johnson were British-born, and Himid, Niati and Ryan were born in Zanzibar, Algeria and Montserrat respectively, these artists typified the profile of new Black artists in Britain. They were educated in Britain, art school-trained, and adept at using the languages and devices of modern and contemporary art, to make the work they wanted to make.

Two other vitally important factors in the practices of these artists were their critical approaches to art history and the extent to which they were referencing ongoing debates about the specificities of the identities and struggles of Black women. During the course of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, a new generation of Black artists made work that critiqued and interrogated dominant notions of art history. These artists, having received BA and, in some instances, MA degrees from the country’s art schools, were well placed to appreciate the extent to which dominant notions of the Western art historical canon excluded, as a matter of course, artists such as themselves. These Black artists were keenly aware of the ways in which art history had failed them, and were determined that this willful failure would not go unremarked or unchallenged. Consequently, their work frequently resonated with references to the manifestation, consequences, and implications of this exclusion. But this was not simply a strategy of critique and critical engagement. Artists such as Himid took art history to task, partly as a way of inserting themselves into its narrative.

The other factor that frequently informed the work of these women artists was the new articulations of the specificities of Black women, which were being voiced during the course of the early 1980s. The African-American feminists of the Combahee River Collective authored a statement arguing that Black women experienced a particular form of oppression because, as Black women, they stood in polar opposition to the normative, as defined and prescribed by the white masculinist hegemony.⁴ It was to a great extent the articulation of such sentiments that provided a blueprint for statements subsequently made by Black women artists in the UK, for example:

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.⁵

Very much reflecting these bold and precise new articulations, Claudette Johnson, whose work was a consistent feature of the Black women artists’ exhibitions of the 1980s, summarised the challenges facing Black women as artists (and provided a context in which her work and the work of other Black women artists could most effectively be read). This summary appeared in her statement for The Image Employed⁶ catalogue:

Within the term ‘Art’, the work, experiences, culture and values of the Black artist are too often ignored, obscured, devalued, misrepresented, or misunderstood. This is perhaps inevitable in a society where the criteria that have defined and controlled the production of Western art are blindly applied to the work of artists whose cultural heritage is Asian, African or Caribbean. The work of the Black artist involves the expression of her or his life experience. Here in Britain that experience includes institutionalised racism and class oppression. Any assessment of Black art which fails to fully acknowledge these factors is at best superficial and at worst invalid.⁷

Johnson went on to identify what she considered to be the unique position of the Black woman, in simultaneously experiencing both racism and sexism:

The White woman, whose creativity and human potential are forcibly limited, distorted or aborted, by male definitions of her sexuality, experiences sexism. The Black man, who is subtly and brutally degraded by a skein of lies and violence designed to maintain and perpetuate his position of economic vulnerability, where his labour is cheap and abundant, experiences racism.

Whilst the Black woman experiences oppression on the grounds of her sex, sexuality and race, there is not yet a word that properly describes the specific and deliberate nature of the oppression. She does not experience sexism exactly as the White woman nor racism exactly as the Black man. The quality, nature and forms [of her oppression] relate to her specifically as a Black woman with a history and struggle of her own. This is the present, out of which the Black woman artist creates her future.’⁸

Following on from the Africa Centre exhibition was the numerically larger group exhibition Black Woman Time Now.⁹ The exhibition featured Brenda Agard, Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Jean Campbell, Margaret Cooper, Elizabeth Eugene, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Mumtaz Karimjee, Cherry Lawrence, Houria Niati, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, Andrea Telman and Leslee Wills. Two years later, another group exhibition was curated and organised by Himid. This exhibition, The Thin Black Line,¹⁰ was to be her single most high-profile curatorial undertaking of the decade, taking place in the ICA, at the time one of the most important, prestigious and well-located galleries in central London. On account, in part, of its location, The Thin Black Line garnered significant amounts of press attention which offered both new insights and old prejudices.

Lubaina Himid was one of the most important and accomplished women artists to be identified with the 1980s emergence and development of Black artists in Britain. Alongside her studio practice as a painter and creator of mixed media pieces, she established a reputation as a curator of Black artists’ exhibitions, both gender-specific, such as the exhibitions referenced above, and non-gender-specific.

Himid was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania in 1954, coming to England shortly after her birth. A degree in Theatre Design was awarded to her in 1976 after a period of study at Wimbledon School of Art. It was in 1979 that Himid began to organise exhibitions. She started by showing work in a central London restaurant, though it was not until 1983 that Himid organised the first of several widely respected exhibitions of work by Black women artists. Himid’s preface to The Thin Black Line exhibition catalogue summarised the curatorial position she adopted for these exhibitions:

All eleven artists in this exhibition are concerned with the politics and realities of being Black Women. We will debate upon how and why we differ in our creative expression of these realities. Our methods vary individually from satire to storytelling, from timely vengeance to careful analysis, from calls to arms to the smashing of stereotypes. We are claiming what is ours and making ourselves visible. We are eleven of the hundreds of creative Black Women in Britain. We are here to stay.¹¹

Himid was a wide-ranging artist whose work embraced and could be divided into a number of themes: satirising white society and white/European cultural orthodoxies; celebrating the creativity and resourcefulness of Black people and Black women; and challenging the skewed ways in which dominant notions of art history exist. But Himid’s work did more than simply satirise, celebrate or critique. Through her paintings she sought to challenge dominant and oppressive versions of history and in so doing, continually sought to rescue Black historical figures from an ever-threatening obscurity. Typical in this regard is her 1987 work, Scenes from the Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (watercolour and pencil on paper, 15 sheets). In this series, which echoed and recalled Jacob Lawrence’s magnificent work of 1938, his Toussaint L’Ouverture Series, Himid depicted assorted scenes from the life and legend of Toussaint L’Ouverture – This Gilded African,¹² the eighteenth century military commander and revolutionary who occupied such a respected position in Black history (among those who were aware of him). On one such sheet, beneath stylised renderings of the warrior statesman and a partial view of his mount, Himid offered the following sentences: ‘Toussaint was known as The Centaur of the Savannahs he rode 125 miles a day. He could jump on a horse at full speed and was still a fine rider at 60’.¹³

Himid’s work also had the aim of challenging and undermining patriarchal systems and patriarchal modes of thought and behaviour. To this end, she regularly employed humour, often producing caustic renderings of her tormentors in the form of wooden cut-out figures. One such figure depicted a white man as a facile clown, chasing, or seeking to lure, a Black woman with a carrot on a stick. Another earlier piece showed a white man masturbating over himself with an enormous penis in one hand. Out of his penis ejaculated the filth of the world: warfare, destruction, pornography, exploitation and so on.

For a period of time Himid worked closely, in a number of ways, with the Glasgow-born artist Maud Sulter (who died in 2008, still in her forties). Together they were responsible for the only British-produced book dedicated to examining and celebrating the work of Black women artists. Their publishing company, Urban Fox Press, published Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity in 1990.¹⁴ As mentioned, Himid’s work was included in the landmark exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian artists in post-war Britain, Hayward Gallery, London, 1989. This allowed Himid and Sulter to contribute a text – A Statement from the Elbow Room, ‘Freedom and change: she who writes her story rewrites history’ – in the ‘Other Voices’ section of The Other Story catalogue.¹⁵

It was a testament to the appeal of Himid’s work that it was used to illustrate the covers of several publications that sought to chronicle the Black British presence. These include Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, published by Chicago University Press in 1996, and, five years later, Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture, published by Routledge in 2001. In similar regard, a detail of one of Himid’s installations, Naming the Money (2004) graced the cover of Imagining Transatlantic Slavery. More recently, Himid’s work was used in the publicity for the major Tate Britain exhibition, Migrations: Journeys Through British Art, 31 January – 12 August 2012. Himid’s image was Between the Two my Heart is Balanced (1991).

22. Sue Smock, The General (detail), (1970).

As stated earlier in this chapter, the three most significant exhibitions that signalled the newly conspicuous presence of Black women artists were all the work of Lubaina Himid, and the most complete overview of the nature and impact of Himid’s 1980s curatorial work was provided in ‘A statement from The Elbow Room’ in The Other Story catalogue. In 1986, the Elbow Room was the name given to a space within a largely unoccupied shell of a building near Borough tube station in London. Himid used this space for one exhibition that she organised – Unrecorded Truths.¹⁶ Subsequently Maud Sulter joined Himid in her organising and curatorial work, and the site of the Elbow Room became a terraced house in Martello Street, Hackney, London. For a while thereafter, the Elbow Room maintained a status as a non-building-based operation, centred on the curatorial activities of Himid and Sulter.

The effect of Himid’s three women-only exhibitions and their ensuing debates was that by the mid 1980s, an increasing number of people were able to confidently discuss the work of Black women artists as a recognisable entity. During the course of the twentieth century, African-American women artists, alongside their male counterparts, had struggled for visibility. By the end of the twentieth century, the Black woman artist had become an increasingly recognised (though to some extent, still very much challenged) component of the US art scene. The closing decades of the twentieth century saw Britain’s Black women artists engaged in similar struggles, with the same partial outcomes. Perhaps the most positive legacy of the emergence of Black women artists is the existence of a number of texts that attempt to illustrate and define those particular aspects and components of Black artists’ work. Whereas before 1985 there was little or nothing (in writing) that dealt with the specifics of the Black woman as artist, by the end of the decade several key texts were in print. One such text was the Chila Kumari Burman essay touched on in Chapter Five, ‘There Have Always Been Great Blackwomen Artists’.¹⁷ Another such text is Gilane Tawadros’s ‘Black Women in Britain: A Personal & Intellectual Journey’.¹⁸ Lubaina Himid also provided several such essays, including ‘Mapping: A Decade of Black Women Artists’.¹⁹ As noted earlier, Himid and Sulter, who established a publishing company, Urban Fox Press, as an extension of their Elbow Room activities, were responsible for producing Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, the only book (thus far) devoted entirely to the work of Black women artists in Britain during the 1980s. During the 1990s, several monographs on Black women artists were brought into existence.²⁰

One reviewer of The Thin Black Line concluded her review by stating that ‘as a showcase for the work of black women artists [the exhibition] will no doubt inspire and encourage similar exhibitions.’²¹ This was indeed the case, as the next few years witnessed a significant number of exhibitions of work by Black women artists. This growth in exhibition activity (together with the existence of a number of texts that attempt to illustrate and define Black women artists’ work) was Lubaina Himid’s legacy.

Elsewhere, in another text, Sutapa Biswas and Marlene Smith underlined the argument about the historical non-recognition of Black women as artists:

Within the context of current art criticism the nineteenth century view of Black people as ‘other’ is still dominant. On the right, mainstream art has failed to acknowledge the work of Black artists. The left on the other hand has framed us within an anthropological context.²²

Biswas and Smith could derive little or no comfort from the writings of white feminist art historians. They continued, ‘similarly, feminist art critics have evaded issues of race. For example, in Framing Feminism, Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–85, Black women’s work is dealt with as an adjunct to the main thesis.’ This pathology of treating certain artists as almost an afterthought, or an addendum to a supposedly central thesis, was evidenced in other publications.²³

The problem, as artists and writers such as Kumari Burman, Smith and Biswas saw it, was that assorted academics, art historians, curators and activists, both men and women, representing different constituencies, had all overlooked or ignored the specificities and the contributions of the Black woman artist. The Ghanaian writer Kwesi Owusu was also criticised by Biswas and Smith for apparently not dealing adequately with issues of gender in his work. Biswas and Smith had both been included in The Thin Black Line, and a year later, Owusu’s book The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain²⁴ commented on this show as a successful, triumphant undertaking. Using street-wise terms of approval that were Jamaican in origin and were popular at the time his book was written, Owusu described the exhibition as being ‘big, broad and massive’ and as bringing to the fore ‘Fresh evocations of Black experience and collective identities, complemented by challenging and accessible visual arts discourses.’²⁵ However, Owusu’s approval of the exhibition cut little or no ice with Biswas and Smith. They dismissed his book with the sentiments:

Conversely in The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain, the issues of gender are not dealt with.

This is not to imply that by simply naming Black women artists these texts would improve. Their problem lies beyond the ability to list Black women’s exhibitions or reproduce their images. Their theories need to be revised to make the issues of both race and gender central and connected.

There is a failure to recognise the full significance of the developing discourse on race/gender and cultural production.²⁶

Himid and other Black women artists had also argued that (before, during and subsequent to the conspicuous emergence of ‘the Black woman artist’ and their attendant exhibitions), the practice of Black Art, as defined and reported by Black men, was aesthetically, intellectually and politically cramped. Himid considered that Black women artists were still being comprehensively ignored and, like Biswas and Smith, she saw no room for complacency:

There can be no survey, no overview, no clear picture of art in the twentieth century without the work, the theory and the philosophy of the Black woman artist. We are still left gasping however at the unrelenting omissions by galleries, archivists, historians and indeed fellow artists.²⁷

It was, though, not so much the case that prior to the 1980s there was an absence of Black women practicing as artists. Artists such as Merdelle Irving and Sue Smock were actively exhibiting during the 1970s.²⁸ Rather, the problem lay in their apparent invisibility or marginalisation as exhibition organisers, curators, art critics and artists. The exhibition from Britain that went to Festac’ 77²⁹ featured work by twelve men and only one woman (Sue Smock). We do not know to what extent Black women artists of the 1960s and 1970s voiced displeasure at their limited representation in exhibitions such as Festac ’77, but within less than ten years the issue of ‘representation’ had taken centre stage and Black women artists were not only vocalising their frustration, they were also building for themselves platforms of visibility and dialogue. Beyond this, certain Black women artists were, briefly, recipients of a pronounced level of interest from art critics and the art establishment during the 1980s.

But the emerging issues of ‘representation’ that Black women artists were addressing did not simply relate to Black artists’ undulating profiles and fortunes. Black women artists (during the 1980s) began to level the charge of discrimination at those responsible for high-profile Black exhibitions. Black artists, men and women, were increasingly coming to express the view that they simply had to be represented in major exhibitions organised and curated by white people. So too Black women artists were increasingly coming to express the view that there simply was no excuse for them being kept out of major Black exhibitions. Despite the extent to which representation became a visible issue in the 1980s, there was still, by the close of the decade, a perceived failure of Black male artists (working as critics and curators) to acknowledge to a greater degree the existence and contributions of Black women artists.

This failure was, according to some Black women artists, no more apparent than in The Other Story exhibition.³⁰ Despite the broad curatorial brush strokes of the exhibition (it claimed to indicate and represent key works reflecting the presence of Asian, African and Caribbean artists in postwar Britain), there was within the show a complete absence of contributions by Black women artists of the older generation. And, so it was charged, even women artists of the younger generation were sparingly represented. Biswas, one of those not included in the exhibition, hung much of her The Other Story review around the issue of exclusion: ‘Araeen [curator of the exhibition] jeopardises [the exhibition] by … neglecting what would have been the show’s major strengths, particularly the contribution of black women’.³¹

Biswas chastised Araeen for ‘cleverly’ deflecting attention away from the apparently limited representation of women in the exhibition by hanging the work of those women who were included in ‘isolated categories’, implying that a ‘women’s section’ would have been more appropriate. In case Araeen needed any advice as to which women he could have/should have included, Biswas went on to write ‘… he has deliberately missed out the work of artists like Houria Niati, Marlene Smith, Claudette Johnson, Sokari Douglas Camp, Nina Edge, Bhajan Hunjan, Shanti Thomas, Ingrid Pollard, Zarina Bhimji, Amanda Holiday, and so on.’³²

By the early 1990s, what appeared to be a ‘consensus of pluralism’³³ could be discerned in a number of exhibitions of Black artists’ work. Not only were Black women artists being represented in exhibitions in relatively greater numbers, but other signifiers of diversity – such as sexuality – were beginning to appear as a pronounced strand within Black artists’ practice and exhibitions. In this regard, the work of those Black photographers and film-makers who have located gay politics and Black homosexual identity at the centre of their creativity must be referenced. One of the most striking characteristics of the development of Black visual arts activity from the late 1980s onwards has been the emergence of film-makers such as Isaac Julien and photographers such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Sunil Gupta and Ajamu.³⁴ These artists have all dealt with issues of homosexuality and its relationship to culture, race, nationality, identity and, just as importantly, its relationship to those activities and that counter-cultural stance of activism generically and historically referred to as ‘the struggle’.

Spaces for these artists and these types of work were opened up and made possible by the endeavours and the struggles of Black art practitioners and Black curatorial activity of early-mid 1980s Britain, particularly the activist work of Black women artists. Post-riots 1981 Britain saw Black ideas of ‘difference’ and political demands for space, representation and resources becoming more defined and articulated. The emergence of work by Black photographers and film-makers who have located gay politics, Black homosexual identity and the Black male body at the centre of their creativity has been a continuation of this process.

Historically, certain people had argued that ‘the struggle’ had been located around ‘masculinist’ sensibilities, policed by heterosexual Black men.³⁵ In this scenario, heterosexual Black women were cast as not much more than a supportive and tangential component, relegated to realms of domesticity or ‘women’s issues’. Homosexual Black people, of both sexes, were assigned no role or visibility. Mirroring shifts in other spheres, gay Black artists moved the terms of reference irreversibly when they insisted that homosexual identity had a valid and central place within Black artists’ exhibitions, as well as within debates about what ‘the struggle’ was and along what lines it should/ could be conducted. These artists and activists similarly argued that the dominant activism around homosexuality and gay rights was problematic, lacking, so it was argued, due considerations of issues of ‘race’ and racism’.

The mid to late 1980s manifestation of a ‘consensus of pluralism’, incorporating as it did disparate notions of sexuality as well as a questioning and critiquing of notions of nationality, race and gender was summarised and celebrated by Sunil Gupta in his 1993 book and exhibition, Disrupted Borders.³⁶ Within this book and exhibition, Gupta sought to bring together strands from his assorted projects as a curator, artist and cultural activist that he had undertaken from 1986 onwards. In his introduction to the book, Gupta wrote:

Since 1986 I have been involved in organising exhibitions around a variety of specialist themes to bring targeted audiences into the gallery. There have been lesbian and gay shows, Black and Asian shows, now I want to bring these issues not only into context with each other but also to confront the failure of modernism to take into account the wide variety of constituencies for the production and consumption of art on a world-wide scale.³⁷

Pioneering practitioners such as Merdelle Irving, Sue Smock and, later, Sunil Gupta, helped immeasurably to advance the causes of a wide range of artists who emerged in subsequent decades.