Race Equality at UCL History of Art

Support and Resources at UCL

Race Equality & Race Equality Steering Group
Both History of Art and UCL have a zero-tolerance policy with regard to Racial and Xenophobic Harassment, and key contacts can be found in the hyperlink. Even if you are not directly affected, but have seen someone else being harassed, do not let it go unchallenged, but become an Active Bystander.
RaceMatters@UCL is for networking, peer support, sharing ideas and articles of interest, forging scholarly connections and collaborations, organising formal and social events, and positively influencing policy and practice on ‘race’ equality at UCL.
The Black and Minority Ethnic Students’ Officer represents BME students and students of colour on campus. The office is currently held by Sandy Ogundele. Email them at bmes.officer@ucl.ac.uk or phone them at 0207 679 7392.
You can also join the UCLU BME Network by signing up to their Facebook.
You can also follow the Decolonise UCL page, which provides information on three linked UCLU campaigns: Decolonise Education, Decolonise the Mind and Decolonise the Institution.

Support and Resources in the Department

We are profoundly committed to welcoming more students from ethnic minority backgrounds to the Department, and one of our key priorities is to ensure that all students and staff feel welcome and supported. We always appreciate feedback as to how we can do better in this regard - please get in touch with our EDI Committee Chairs Eleanor Day (e.day@ucl.ac.uk) and Emily Floyd (e.floyd@ucl.ac.uk) to offer feedback, or come along to an EDI committee meeting - all welcome!
The Department of History of Art and UCL itself are highly international, with students and staff coming from many different countries, cultures and backgrounds.
At History of Art, we are also committed to decentering and diversifying our curriculum. We believe in radically disrupting the white, western canon; we believe in centering artists once pushed to the margins, and we look beyond Europe and the Global North in order to explore far wider horizons, and this is reflected in the courses that we offer our students.

Race in Art Resources

Black Identities and Art - Tate

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Miguel Cabrera Mexico, From Spaniard and Morisca, Albino Girl (De español y morisca, albina) (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

"Casta paintings made in eighteenth-century colonial Mexico depicted racial mixing in colonial society and reflected the anxieties of Spanish elites about their relationship to the mixed race ‘castas’ that made up most of the population. Casta paintings represented an attempt to categorize and control racial mixing, and to confront European stereotypes of Spaniards born in the Americas as having ‘impure blood’. Typically made in series, they depict family groupings and bear labels naming the racial mixtures of the different individuals depicted. This painting, number six in a series of sixteen by the acclaimed Mexican painter Miguel Cabrera, shows the child of a Spaniard and a woman labeled as a ‘morisca’, here meaning someone with one Black parent. Their child is labeled as an albino, and in the next painting in the series, number 7, that supremely white child is shown marrying a Spaniard and producing a dark-skinned child labeled a ‘torna atrás’ or ‘turn backwards’. From Spaniard and Morisca, Albino Girl, thus suggests the impossibility of removing the ‘stain’ of Blackness, and that even the lightest skinned person might hide within them the genes of their distant African ancestors."

- Dr Emily Floyd