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This article discusses the changing nature of art history when it comes to black British artists and suggests that such history has perhaps moved away from existing to instead correcting or addressing the systemic absences of such artists from British art. This is typified by Rasheed Araeen's 1989 exhibition The Other Story, the first major attempt to create a broad black British art history, and several other not dissimilar, exhibitions. The article also considers what changes to the fortunes of a small number of black British artists might be deduced from the awarding of honors by the queen and the extension of membership in the Royal Academy to a handful. The article draws attention to the ways in which major London galleries such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Serpentine, and the Whitechapel have, over the course of the past two decades, hosted the first main-space solo shows of black British artists' work. With so much having happened to limited numbers of black British artists, this introduction suggests that burgeoning scholarship on these and other artists is timely, and that the articles assembled for this issue of Nka are a reflection of this increased attention. Among its concluding considerations are the ways in which much of this new scholarship emanates from US rather than from British universities. Finally, the article urges a "rescuing from obscurity" of important pioneering texts on black British artists.

Black artists have been making major contributions to the global art scene since at least the middle of the twentieth century. While some of these artists - of African and Caribbean descent - have been embraced at times by the art world, they have mostly been neglected or have not received the recognition they deserve. Taking its starting point as the Windrush-era Caribbean Artists Movement, and considering and contextualising the political, cultural, and artistic climate from which it emerged, this concise introduction showcases the work of seventy Black-British artists from the 1930s until the present. Artworks in a range of media offer a lens through which to understand some of the events and issues confronted and explored, shedding light on the unique Black-British experience. Constructed around contemporary ideas on race, national identity, citizenship, gender, class, sexuality and aesthetics in Britain, this book interrogates themes at the heart of Black-British Art, revealing art in dialogue with a complex past and present. Featuring some of the most prominent and influential Black-British artists of recent decades, as well as less well-known artists, it also includes work from a new generation of artists at the forefront of contemporary art. At a time when visibility within the art world has taken on a renewed urgency, this is a timely and accessible introduction celebrating Black-British artists and their outstanding contribution to art history

In "Iconography after Identity," a text published as a part of the book Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, art historian Kobena Mercer puts forward a challenge.1 He calls for artists, curators, and critics to begin the long, overdue process of constructing an art history that maps the dialogues and developments of black British art onto broader stories of British and twentieth-century art as a whole. He urges the reader to confront the critical tendencies that have sidelined comprehensive analysis of black British art, and move beyond narratives that approach the creative production of black artists instrumentally, as a lens through which, at best, to examine (and, at worst, explain) the social and political implications of race and ethnicity in twentieth century Britain. Echoing Mercer's assessment, recent publications by scholars such as Leon Wainwright and, from an American perspective, Darby English have highlighted the ways in which this problematic halfstory has been written both by racism's "inventive way of isolating black realities from the spaces whose purity it would conserve by doing so" and also – notably – even by some countermeasures against this systemic racism. Returning to British shores, to these two factors we might also add the dominance of voices from the fields of sociology and cultural theory, not least in important foundational works by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, in the establishment of early scholarship around "black art" and black British artists. Arguing for a loosely reconfigured version of Erwin Panofsky's iconographic model, Mercer offers one possibility for object-based engagement. More recently, English, Wainwright and others have looked to frameworks of materiality and phenomenology (respectively), to de-center narratives of racial and ethnic identity in art historical assessments of works by black and diaspora artists. But, of course, these critiques are not new, nor is the stilted discourse that they observe. They join the voices of Rasheed Araeen, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Veronica Ryan, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Marlene Smith, and others, a chorus gathering force since the late 1970s, when the constellation of artists, activists, and critics of what has come to be known, in some circles, as the Black Arts Movement burst on the British art scene. Working in relation to questions of "blackness" in Britain and the possibilities and implications of a black British art through visual practice and in art-adjacent practices as artist-curators, artist-critics, artist-researchers and artist-archivists, though somewhat imprecise and contested, the Black Arts Movement laid the foundations for the radical art history that lies at the root of Mercer's challenge: an art history that accounts for the work of black British artists within the context of wider national and international aesthetic, cultural and historical formations, rather than footnotes haphazardly inserted into mainstream narratives of art in the twentieth century, if they (black British artists) are included at all. This article springs from the interstices of a pair of projects—one that is wrapping up, and the other starting out—which continue the work of excavating this art history, building on a rapidly growing literature around the Black Arts Movement in Britain by tracing its roots from the early 1960s. Following the contours of the first two of what Stuart Hall has called "waves" of black arts activity in postwar Britain, this article takes as a starting point a critical examination of the notion of "black art" in a British context in order to unravel attendant questions around the formation and framing of what has come to be generally known as a Black Arts Movement. This mode of engagement with the creative products of black British artists must address, as Mercer notes, "the necessity of interpreting the work as a document of the human imagination that exists as an object of aesthetic attention in its own right." This is not to say, however, that we should, or even can, disavow the politics of identity or politics more broadly. Indeed, much of the work created during the broad period from the early 1960s is overtly concerned with the radical possibilities made available by the construction and interrogation of identities that are variously and simultaneously defined by race, gender, class, and sexuality. To disentangle aesthetics and politics entirely in these cases would be futile and tell a different, but still problematic, half-story. Rather, building on and supplementing the work that has been done in this field by earlier historians and critics working within identity-based frameworks, this article, and the projects from which it arises, aim to create a more comprehensive understanding of artworks that at times deal explicitly, though not exclusively, with identity, together with wider questions of politics, aesthetics, and the construction of art's histories.

The following article deals with a somewhat neglected aspect of Stuart Hall's manifold activities and its relevance for his theoretical work: his interest in and commitment to the promotion of black British art.

This book, co-authored with Ian Baucom and edited by David A Bailey, is the outcome of a lengthy period of research into the last twenty years of Black Art in Britain. It focuses particularly on the Thatcher period and the explosion of the Black Arts Movement in the wake of civil unrest and rioting in a number of British cities. The book is extensively illustrated bringing together a dialogue between leading artists, curators, art historians, and critics including Stanley Abe Jawad, Adelaide Bannerman, Allan deSouza, Kobena Mercer, Yong Soon Min and Judith Wilson. Combining cultural theory with anecdote and experience, it examines how the black British artists of the 1980s should be viewed historically and explores the political, cultural, and artistic developments that sparked the movement. It reviews practice in the context of public funding, and the trans-national art market and its legacy for today's artists and activists. The volume includes a unique catalogue of images, a comprehensive bibliography, and a series of descriptive timelines situating the movement in relation to relevant artworks, films, exhibitions, cultural criticism, and political events from 1960 to 2000. The book has become an established point of reference for the study of Black Art and cultural developments of Braitain during the period. In March 2007 it was awarded the INIVA Historians of British Art Book Prize.

A review essay on books by (1) Andy R. Brown, Political Languages of Race and the Politics of Exclusion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); (2) Diane Frost, Work and Community among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool U Press, 1999); & (3) Michael Rowe, The Racialisation of Disorder in Twentieth Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). The authors use different methods to explore black British history & racism in the 19th & 20th centuries. Brown's examination of the politicization of "race" since 1948 employs a sociological perspective; Frost includes case studies & interviews with historical players; & Rowe's study of racial disorder uses both historic & sociological perspectives. Brown focuses on the discursive formation of a political language of exclusion of black migrants in postwar GB to reexamine the claim that the 1960s birth of "Powellism" was the result of a new "commonsense racism." The longest chronological period is covered by Frost, whose history of Kru settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone, & Liverpool, England, draws on both oral history & private/public papers. Rowe looks at anti-black riots of 1919 & 1958/59, & disorders associated with Fascist demonstrations in the 1930s, to examine official attempts to "racialize" them, as well as the role played by the media. Taken together, these books offer valuable insights into different aspects of recent black history & official responses to black settlement in GB. J. Lindroth