The Influence of the British Black Art Movement

Artists Sonia Boyce, Isaac Julien, Eddie Chambers and Harold Offeh talk to Anne McElvoy about their art and the influence of the British Black Art movement - which began around the time of the First National Black Art Convention in 1982 organised by the Blk Art Group and held at Wolverhampton Polytechnic.

Isaac Julien shows at the Victoria Miro Gallery. His ten screen installation Lessons of the Hour which looks at the life of Frederick Douglass is on show at the Museum of Modern Art in Edinburgh until August 31st.
Harold Offeh is an artist, curator and senior lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University. His work Covers features in Untitled: art on the conditions of our time which opened at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham and which has been re-curated and is now on show at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge until October 3rd. You can also see a new piece at the Wellcome Institute exhibition Joy which runs until February 2022.
Eddie Chambers has written Roots and Culture: Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Britain and Black Artists in British Art: A History since the 1950s. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
Sonia Boyce is Professor at Middlesex University, a Royal Academician and the Principal-Investigator of the Black Artists & Modernism project. She will be showing at the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Nottingham Contemporary's The Place Is Here brought together around 100 works in 2017 when this conversation was recorded.

You might be interested in the playlist on the Free Thinking programme website Exploring Black History https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08t2qbp

Producer: Karl Bos
Editor: Robyn Read

(Main Image: Sonia Boyce, Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great, 1986. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © Sonia Boyce. All Rights Reserved. DACS 2015.)

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