Rethinking Black Art as a Category of Experience
- Submitting institution
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The University of Huddersfield
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 48
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/14714787.2017.1328986
- Title of journal
- Visual Culture in Britain
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 163
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 1471-4787
- Open access status
- Technical exception
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Black art was a widely used category in the late 1970s and 1980s to describe the artwork of British people of South Asian, African or African-Caribbean descent. Since those decades scholarship has tended to focus either on the activities of these artists (their exhibitions and/or activism, for example) or on monographs of these individual artists within this grouping. The problems associated with the collective labelling of such a group, however, have not been sufficiently addressed.
This article examines the limitations of the term Black art, arguing that it runs the risk of reducing work to being evaluated narrowly, and through the lens of racial/ethnic descent. The term needs to be reconceptualised. It served to represent a ‘moment’ in British visual cultural history that was significant but is inadequate to describe the work of British artists from black and South Asian backgrounds since the 1990s. This is a bold assertion: the marginalisation of these artists has stunted the theoretical growth of the subject area in favour of a historical, and even hagiographical, approach. Diaspora aesthetics is proffered as a credible alternative concept that accommodates multiple journeys of transformation and that crucially turns the focus onto the art and not the artist (and their ethnic/cultural identity). The article’s strength lies in its historical description of the evolution of the term ‘Black art’ as well as its radical critique of it.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -