An exhibition by The Collective Makers to celebrate black heritage and culture.

The Collective Makers have partnered up with Woolwich Works, Art Hub and Clothes for Causes to present the work of some of the best emerging black visual artists from the borough and beyond.

The aim is to promote, inspire and mentor emerging artists from ethnically diverse backgrounds and seek to create opportunities for emerging artists within and outside of Royal Borough of Greenwich and in partnership with other institutions.

Expressions of Freedom is a collective exhibition of 11 talented black female artists using different art mediums to express their understanding and view of what freedom means to them.

The exhibition is curated by Black Womxn Artist Network, a non-profit organisation aiming to promote, celebrate, connect and support Black Women / Womxn identifying Artists by creating opportunities for black female-identifying artists within the UK who often do not get to showcase their work and are often not celebrated and voices not heard.

Showcasing artists

• Lindsey Daniella

• Rachel Harvey

• Sharon Adebisi

• Sharon James

• Sabina Silver

• Birungi Kawooya

• Natasha Muluswela

• Leah Adamson

• Gayle Ebose

• Juma Dimmock

• Caroline Lacoma

The first major survey of British-Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, whose career as a studio portraitist, photojournalist and Black lifestyle photographer spans six decades and records major social and political changes in London and Accra. Born in 1929 in Ghana, James Barnor experienced first-hand his country’s independence as well as the formation of the diaspora to London in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, he opened his famous Ever Young studio in Accra, where he immortalised a nation craving modernity and independence in an ambiance that was animated by conversation and highlife music. 

Wording by Serpentine Gallery

In 2020, people all over the world have found themselves separated from friends and loved ones for long periods. Games and hobbies have provided comfort and stimulation, offering fun and creative ways to pass the time on our own or with our households, and opportunities to connect with others online.

The Portico Library first opened in 1806. Its books contain histories of games from that time, plus other volumes on play and pastimes that continue to have influence today. This exhibition presents these alongside artworks by Birungi Kawooya, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Gray Wielebinski, Hope Strickland and Polly Tayarachakul, plus activities inspired by the Library’s history and collection.

Early 19th-century games reflected the evolving concept of childhood and innovations in printing technologies. Many were designed to reinforce cultural conventions and dominant attitudes, but playing games can also help us to learn about relationships, probability, language, behaviour and society. While communal hobbies and pastimes can strengthen bonds and encourage creativity, the artists and writers in this exhibition also consider how games are used as social and ideological tools by those with power and privilege.

The exhibition is online and you can view my dance themed artwork.

Wording by Portico Library

The first major survey of the celebrated London-based painter

Widely considered to be one of the most important painters of her generation, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her enigmatic portraits of fictitious people.

Her paintings often allude to historic European portraiture – notably Francisco de Goya, John Singer Sargent and Édouard Manet – yet in subject matter and technique her approach is decidedly contemporary. Through her focus on the depiction of imagined black characters Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings raise important questions of identity and representation.

This exhibition will bring together over 80 paintings and works on paper from 2003 to the present day in the most extensive survey of the artist’s career to date.

Yiadom-Boakye was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 2018 and was the 2012 recipient of the Pinchuk Foundation Future Generation Prize. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013.

Written by TATE Britain

The Get Down dancers are featured in this exhibition in Lyric Square, Hammersmith!

Black artistic and creative culture is embedded in the fabric of British society. As part of Black History Month, Hammersmith BID has commissioned a digital exhibition, entitled. 'What does Black Art mean to you?' The show has been curated by Bolanle Tajudeen, the founder of Black Blossoms School of Art & Culture, with portraits by up-and-coming London-based photographer Sadeì Elufowoju and creatively designed by Azarra Amoy.

Through the words of emerging creatives, this show explores what black art means to their work and lives, whilst also presenting the artwork of some of the most exciting Black visual artists living in Britain today.

A full list of everyone involved is on my instagram post.

Award-winning author Bernardine Evaristo, poet and playwright Joan Anim-Addo and the first woman ever to be appointed head of a UK dental school, Cynthia Pine, are among 40 phenomenal women being celebrated in the first ever photographic exhibition to honour Britain's black female professors.

The exhibition, Phenomenal Women: Portraits of UK Black Female Professors, features portraits of 40 professors across a broad range of subjects including law, medicine, creative writing and sociology.  It was researched and curated by Dr Nicola Rollock, Reader in Equity & Education at Goldsmiths University of London, who has been examining the career experiences and strategies of black female professors at UK higher education establishments over the past three years.  Phenomenal Women: Portraits of UK Black Female Professors, aims to highlight the presence and excellence of all the women included and provide a platform for debate about what it takes to reach this highest level of academic scholarship. The 40 women have all been professors at some point over the past three years. The project builds on Dr Rollock’s 2019 research which showed the barriers faced by black women as they worked to navigate their way through higher education and the strategies they used to help them reach professorship.

Fewer than 1% of professors in the UK are black despite increases in overall levels of academic staff. Black women represent the smallest group when both race and gender are considered together. They are three times less likely to be professors than their white female counterparts and half as likely as black men.

The portraits were taken by photographer Bill Knight OBE, who travelled across England and Wales to capture the images.

Wording by the Mayor of London.

A virtual art exhibition celebrating the beauty and richness of Black culture. Enter the gallery here.

Artist includes:

• Birungi Kawooya

• Amie Snow

• BZDRKO

• Dillon Everest

• Gabrielle Oke

• Jude Amponsah

• Kemi Oloyede

• Kingsley Nebechi

• Kofi Ntiforo

• Kwasi Adom-Frimpong

• Michael Akuagwu

• Naki Nahr

• Narcography

• Sharon Walters

• TiD

CasildART, a south London based art agency, is hosting a pop up gallery in Brixton from 5th October for two weeks.

Owner Sukai Eccleston has taken over unit 33 Granville Arcade, one of the retail spaces, in the ever popular quarter of Brixton Village, to showcase the work of mixed media artist, Estelle Grandidier’s sculptures, drawings and paintings and painter and textile designer, Helena Appio’s prints.    

Artists include:

• Birungi Kawooya

• Estelle Grandidier

• Laji Sanusi

• Oneme Otiti

• Junior Tomlin

• Francilla Seaton

• Helena Appio

Artist Emma Prempeh (b.1996, London) is a fine art graduate from Goldsmiths University and is currently attending an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. Family and generational continuity is often the subject of Prempeh’s paintings, as relational ties are explored and questioned, through the depiction of her mother and grandmother and their experiences. The search of spirituality enables Prempeh to analyse existential questions that are projected upon her reality; the fear of death, memory, ancestral ties. After completing a 2-month residency at V.O Curations, Prempeh has debuted with solo show ‘The Faces of Love’ (13.10-14.11.2020) held at V.O Studios, 242 Marylebone Road.

Wording by V.O. Studios

The first-ever UK exhibition by Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, this epic cycle of new work will explore an imagined ancient myth, with an immersive soundscape by artist Peter Adjaye.

Toyin Ojih Odutola, recognising the pen as a ‘writing tool first’, plays with the idea that drawing can be a form of storytelling. Working exclusively with drawing materials including pastel and charcoal, she approaches her process of drawing as an investigative practice.

Ojih Odutola proposes speculative fictions, inviting the viewer to enter her vision of an uncannily familiar yet fantastical world. Working like an author or poet, she often spends months creating extensive imaginary narratives, which play out through a series of works to suggest a structure of episodes or chapters. Drawing on an eclectic range of references, from ancient history to popular culture to contemporary politics, Ojih Odutola encourages the viewer to piece together the fragments of the stories that she presents.

Written by Barbican Centre.

The Yellow Wallpaper is an exhibition of new portraits by American artist Kehinde Wiley. This will be the first solo exhibition of new work shown by Wiley at a UK museum and also the first to feature exclusively female portraits. The works feature women that the artist met on the streets of Dalston and offer a visual response to American novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s acclaimed feminist text, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

‘The Yellow Wallpaper is a work of literary fiction that explores the contours of femininity and insanity. This exhibition seeks to use the language of the decorative to reconcile blackness, gender, and a beautiful and terrible past.’ — Kehinde Wiley

Gilman’s text is a semi-autobiographical tale which sees her narrator confined to her bedroom after being diagnosed with hysteria and explores the disastrous consequences of denying women independence. In Wiley’s new portraits, each woman is positioned as autonomous, as powerful, as open to individual interpretation and as an emblem of strength within a society of complicated social networks. They wholly embody myriad positions with regard to social class, status, religion, colonialism and the negotiation of gender.

For over fifteen years Wiley has sourced William Morris’s iconic floral designs for his paintings. Building on his interest in the relationship between the human body and the decorative, Wiley’s models are depicted in reimagined fields inspired by the William Morris oeuvre. Wiley’s portraits offer a rubric through which to engage with the beautiful yet fraught histories and traditions that black women — and all women — are heir to.

This exhibition is supported by Stephen Friedman Gallery.

Wording by William Morris

Following the success of Radiating Greatness in 2019, BCA is proud to unveil Breaking Barriers, the second chapter of a three-year project to make visible the journeys of pioneering Black British women who have overcome adversity to take their rightful seat at the table.

Dame Linda Dobbs DBE, Baroness Doreen Lawrence OBE, Maggie Aderin-Pocock MBE, Margaret Casely-Hayford CBE and Shirley Thompson OBE have shared their personal experiences not only to demonstrate the excellence present in Britain’s Black community but to show others what can be achieved.

Wording by Black Cultural Archive

Theaster Gates (b. 1973) is one of the world’s most influential living artists. In Theaster Gates: Amalgam, the artist explores the complex and interweaving issues of race, territory, and inequality in the United States.

The exhibition takes the history of Malaga as its point of departure. During the 19th century, this small island off the coast of Maine, USA, was home to an ethnically-mixed community. In 1912, on the orders of the state governor, Malaga's inhabitants were forcibly removed to the mainland. They were offered no housing, jobs or support.

Amalgam presents sculpture, installation, film and dance that respond to this history. Highlights include a new film, Dance of Malaga 2019, which features the choreography of acclaimed American dancer, Kyle Abraham. Gates’s musical collective, The Black Monks provide the film’s score. Their blues and gospel-inspired sound can be heard throughout the exhibition, continuing into an immersive ‘forest’ installation.

Theaster Gates is a socially engaged artist living and working in Chicago, Illinois. He began his career studying urban planning, which continues to influence his work. He is best known for his projects in South Side, Chicago, where he has redeveloped abandoned buildings for community use. Reminiscent of the ongoing work in the Granby area of Liverpool, Gates shows how art can transform places and improve the lives of the people who live there.

Written by TATE Liverpool.

In an important moment in the art industry, diverse aesthetic and artistic manifestations seek to capture the Afro-Brazilian subjectivity, #BLVCKSBTFLL - Black is Beautiful is born in Bahia, which was the port of entry of the slave ships in Brazil.

These images propose a generous look on the black body as a form of historical repair of the image constructed of people of colour over the years, most often stigmatising and marginalising this body, silencing their spiritual and phenotypic powers that in turn have their self-esteem compromised, reflecting a structural racism that made blacks deny their own image by “whitening” their existence to feel they belonged  within a society ruled by white supremacy.

Without artifice, lack of cultural values, religious and sexual orientation, the composition of images seeks to reveal the black genesis, bringing together elements that point to a place of origin: nature, the cradle of the ancestry of the bodies photographed.

The title of the project is a reference to the Black-and-Beautiful African-American cultural movement that happened in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, deconstructing the notion instilled by racism that the natural black phenotype is ugly or less attractive than the Eurocentric beauty standard.

Writing by Pedro Henrique França. Pedro is a  journalist, author, screenwriter and an admirer of Thiago Borba’s work.

Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s work reflects on subjectivity and individual identity as forms of self-determination. Through painting, she explores how selfhood and personal experience – especially love and loss – marks of existence – constitute a vital and highly personal process of self-historicization vis-à-vis identity formation.

'After Euphoria' draws heavily on the vicissitudes of her own romantic life – past and present - exploring what the artist calls the ‘bitter-sweet reality’ that arrives in the aftermath of heightened emotion and connectivity. Yet the artist also coheres an analogy between falling in and out of love with the mutability of contemporary experience that is desirous of advancement but marked by crisis and change. But what occurs at the end of all these entanglements – amorous or political? Yearwood-Dan proposes a rosy perspective of nostalgia that gives way - starkly and inevitably - to a sudden realisation of disillusionment; that all is not what it's cracked up to be or was. The works in this exhibition explore the awareness of the hues and textures of that epiphany.

“I think the second I stopped trying to hide behind how a feminist, millennial, black woman should be and the goals they should attain I felt the load lift of my shoulders and found the ability to make the most honest work I could make,” says Yearwood-Dan.

Fons Americanus is a 13-metre tall working fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London.

Rather than a celebration of the British Empire, Walker’s fountain explores the interconnected histories of Africa, America and Europe. She uses water as a key theme, referring to the transatlantic slave trade and the ambitions, fates and tragedies of people from these three continents. Fantasy, fact and fiction meet at an epic scale.

This commission has been made using an environmentally-conscious production process and has been built from recyclable or reusable cork, wood and metal. The surface covering is made from a non-toxic acrylic and cement composite that can be used for sculpting or casting. It avoids the use of large quantities of non-recyclable materials and harmful substances often found in the production of exhibitions and installations.

Based in New York, Kara Walker is acclaimed for her candid explorations of race, sexuality and violence. She is best known for her use of black cut-paper silhouetted figures, referencing the history of slavery and the antebellum South in the US through provocative and elaborate installations.

Written by TATE Modern

Become immersed in deep lustres of black punctuated with luminous 24-karat gold and opulent ultramarine blue hues in Lina Iris Viktor’s singular artistic universe.

Her photography, painting and sculptural installations are infused with cultural histories of the global African diaspora and preoccupied with multifaceted notions of blackness: as colour, as material and as socio-political consciousness. To Viktor, black is the proverbial materia prima: the source, the dark matter that birthed everything.

This is the British-Liberian artist’s first major solo exhibition in the UK, with more than 60 works on display in two galleries, many seen for the first time.

Written by Autograph.