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
Resources from the Web
Accessible series of essays in The Public Medievalist, run by scholars in the field, that chart long histories of racism and racialized thinking and challenge misleading perceptions of a ‘whites only’ medieval world.
Exhibition at Getty Centre focusing on images representing the youngest of the three magi, Balthazar, as a Black African, which explored the juxtaposition of a seemingly positive image with painful histories of slavery and Afro-European contact.
An outdoor exhibition at King’s College London (2021) by opera singer Peter Brathwaite, who spoke in our Department last year about his extraordinary ‘Rediscovering Black Portraiture’ project, in which he restages famous paintings with everyday household objects.
Channel B is an audio-visual exploration of Black futurism by the Black-owned art, music, and creative initiative Nine Nights. The exhibition features sound and video installations by founding artists Gaika, GLOR1A and Shannen SP. At the heart of Channel B is the live event series New Syntax, which sees each installation act as staging to host performances by Black artists from across the world (2021-2022)
Black women in Britain lift as they climb and have continued to do so for decades with minimal recognition or praise. Their fierce commitment to the collective care of their communities is sometimes to their own detriment. As our carers, educators, writers, activists, labourers and friends – who are susceptible to incomparable racial and sexual abuse – Black women must be vigorously protected and honoured for their past and continued efforts, as sisters in the struggle (2021).
This portal contains hundreds of references arranged along subject, themes and media in eight bibliographies. It provides access to materials on anti-racist, postcolonial and decolonising art histories and is meant for anyone conducting research in those areas in art history or in visual or spatial culture. It is also meant to support academics in making meaningful change in their departments, their teaching and their research.
The Serpentine presents a major survey of British-Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, whose career spans six decades, two continents and numerous photographic genres through his work with studio portraiture, photojournalism, editorial commissions and wider social commentary (2021)
White Cube Mason’s Yard is pleased to present ‘Oh, The Wind Oh, The Wind’, an exhibition of new works by Theaster Gates. Forming part of a multi-venue presentation in London dedicated to Gates’ involvement with clay, it coincides with ‘A Clay Sermon’ at Whitechapel Gallery and a two-year-long research project and intervention with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection. The full clay project will culminate with a presentation at the Serpentine Pavilion, London, in June 2022. Running 17 September – 30 October 2021.
White Cube Bermondsey is pleased to present ‘Lazarus’, an exhibition of new works by Ibrahim Mahama, including large-scale installation, sculpture, collage and film. The artist’s third show with the gallery, the works come together to address the passage of time, the notion of obsolescence and the potential for regeneration (2021)
From Here to Eternity is the first major retrospective of UK based photographer, Sunil Gupta (b. 1953, New Delhi India) and offers a complex and layered view of Gupta’s unique transcontinental photographic vision. This exhibition is available online.
1-54 is the first leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Founded by Touria El Glaoui, the fair has held annual editions in London since 2013, New York since 2015 and Marrakech since 2018. Drawing reference to the fifty-four countries that constitute the African continent, 1-54 is a sustainable and dynamic platform that is engaged in contemporary dialogue and exchange. (2021)
The Centre’s next Public Lecture Course is called Black British Artists and Activism and it will mine the rich seam that exists where art-making practices and artworks meet politics and political activism.
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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.”
