British black arts movement

The British Black Arts Movement was a radical political art movement that arose around 1982 and, inspired by anti-racist discourse and feminist critique, sought to foreground questions of race and gender and the politics of representation. The movement brought together a young generation of Black and Asian artists in Britain—mostly the descendants of post-war migrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia—who felt that the official art world ignored or exoticised them. The catalyst was the first National Black Art Convention convened by the Blk Art Group in Wolverhampton in 1982. Among its leading figures were Isaac Julien, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, Eddie Chambers, and Marlene Smith. The artists worked with collage, photography, installation, video, and painting, exploring colonial legacies, diasporic identity, and the experience of life in Thatcher's Britain. The curator Lubaina Himid organised several landmark exhibitions, and the movement permanently changed ideas about who and what is represented in British museums and galleries.