The BLK Art Group: 'Whoever Heard of a Black Artist?'

Currently streaming on BBC iPlayer for another eleven months, ‘Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Forgotten Art History’ is a 2018 documentary following artist Sonia Boyce’s three year research project Black Artists & Modernism, which sought to uncover the work of 20th century British Black and South Asian artists whose work had been relegated to museum archives, rarely shown or spoken about. The project, based at the University of the Arts London, culminated in Manchester Art Gallery’s 2018 exhibition ‘Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition’ and aimed to question the role of galleries and museums in representation. The resulting show demonstrated how these public spaces reflect and shape our collective imagination, and examined how exhibitions can affect these shared narratives. What do public museums collect and why? Which works become highlights, and which lie forgotten in storage?

Featured in the documentary are The Blk Art Group, a collective of young black artists formed in Wolverhampton in 1979 whose work raised questions about what black art was, its identity and what it could become in the future. Members included Donald Rodney, Eddie Chambers, Dominic Dawes, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Wenda Leslie, Ian Palmer, Keith Piper, and Marlene Smith, all of whom were raised in or around the industrial West Midlands as children of Caribbean immigrants. In 1982 the group staged ‘The First National Black Art Convention’ in 1982, which was attended by Black artists from across the UK and went on to have a huge influence on artists such as Boyce, Chris Ofili and Steve McQueen. Read more about the convention HERE.

The Blk Art Group Research Project was set up in 2011 by members Keith Piper, Claudette Johnson and Marlene Smith, and an archive of the group’s posters and ephemera can be found on their website. We share here a selection of the group’s posters, with credit to Keith Piper.