BRITISH BLACK ART – Debates on the Western Art History

The conditions of development of British Black Art are tied up with a social and cultural history of Europe, especially the anti-immigration policies of Margaret Thatcher and their consequences, such as the Brixton riots of the early 1980s. British Black Art Works suggests new narratives about canonical artworks of the British Black Art movement, such as Lubaina Himid’s 1984 “Freedom and Change,” Eddie Chambers’ 1980 “Destruction of the National Front” and Sonia Boyce’s 1986 “Lay Back Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great,” interrogating their critical agency from an art-historical perspective. These artworks, art historian Sophie Orlando argues, imply a critical analysis of Western art history.
This volume introduces readers to an important, long-marginalized movement and recontextualizes it with groundbreaking scholarship./

Sophie Orlando is an art historian, researcher for “Black Artists and Modernism” (AHRC funded project based at UAL / Middlesex University, London) and associate professor of theory and contemporary art history at the National Art School, Villa Arson, in Nice. As a specialist in British art and in particular British Black Art, she has published in La revue de l’art, and Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne. Her article “Artistic categories and the Situation of Utterance, the Period from 1989 to 1994 in Great Britain”, appeared in the magazine Critical Interventions: Journal of Art History and Visual Culture (#12, 2013). She is also curator for an exhibition on the British artist Sonia Boyce, at the Villa Arson in January 2016.