‘We became West Indians in London’

Daniel Nelson  Image credit: Denzil Forrester Jah Shaka 1983 Collection Shane Akeroyd, London © Denzil Forrester

The beginning and ending of the timeline of the overdue, powerful exhibition of 70 years of Caribbean-British art at Tate Britain captures much of the story the show tells:

·      1923, Ronald Moody leaves Jamaica for Britain:  he studied chemistry but inspired by Egyptian art at the British Museum he begins exploring carving and later becomes an active member of the Caribbean Artists Movement

·      1938, Trinidad’s C.L.R. James publishes The Black Jacobins, a study of the Haitian slave rebellion that paves the way for serious study of Caribbean society and politics

·      1939, an estimated 1,600 people from the British West Indies are serving in the British Armed Forces.

At the end of the timeline

·      2020, Frank Bowling, born in British Guiana but moved to Britain when he was 19, is knighted for services in art

·      2021, the first police office in 35 years is convicted of manslaughter while on duty, for killing Black former footballer Dalian Atkinson

·      2020, Sonia Boyce, who in the 1980s was associated with the radical Black Arts Movement, represents Britain at the Venice Biennale and Barbados-born Alberta Whittle represents Scotland.

Those timeline entries allude to migration, police racism, violence, Black studies, nationalism, identity, recognition and struggle. The exhibition itself, featuring more than 40 artists and 70 years of work, touches on these and other issues and landmark moments in Black British history.

And what issues, what landmarks, what struggle, what resilience, what humanity.  The Tate’s walls display evidence of an unconscionable history of slavery, colonialism, migration, relentless prejudice and violence, met by sensitivity, courage, persistence, determination, creativity and joy.

Many of the featured artists came from separate islands, consciously reclaimed a brutalised heritage and in the face of relentless prejudice and ignorance discovered a common identity. As writer George Lamming observed, “We became West Indians in London.”

But their work took different shapes, such as Althea McNish’s tropical textile designs inspired by Essex wheat fields and Trinidadian sugar fields; Michael McMillan’s evocative reconstruction of a 1970s front room; Zak Ove’s fabulous Hairy Man made out of Thames rope, mops and wigs. Barbara Walker’s portraits of her son, drawn on photocopies of police forms handed to her each time he was stopped and searched in Birmingham; Donald Locke’s hauntingly dark planation pictures.

Copious photographs reinforce the documentary aspect of the exhibition: this is not a show for aesthetic appreciation of brushstrokes, it’s a show of subversion of Western art classics (Lisa Brice’s reworking of Millais and Manet), of questioning (Blue Curry’s reaction to clichés and stereotypes), of anger (); of the striving for authenticity and roots; of affirmation (Neil Kenlock’s Black panther schoolbags and a large portrait of a reclining woman, with a sketched body and a detailed head) and, of course, of pleasure, letting go and Carnival, Junkanoo, Jonkonnu, Crop Over.

Humour (Chris Ofili’s Union Black flag) and hope, for both community and Black-White solidarity, also make their presence felt, along with a sense of the possibility of change.  It’s not all doom and gloom – though SUS laws, the Lewisham fire, police corruption and harassment and other instances of the seemingly endless White wall of bile all have a place in this collection.  In fact the gloom is consistently contested, fought and turned back on its creators through creativity, imagination, celebration and vigour.

* Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now is at Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1 until 3 April. Info: 7887 888/ tate.org.uk

+ 1-4 December, Consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean, online symposium bringing together an international group of scholars and artists to explore the influence of Stuart Hall, Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Winter on our understanding of public culture, education, counter-histories, colonialism, world-making and the environment, free