Voices of Art, Belonging and Resistance

At the core of this book is a series of conversations with five British artist Black women who exhibited in both Lubaina Himid’s 1985 The Thin Black Line and 2011 Thin Black Line(s) exhibitions: Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce (OBE), Lubaina Himid (MBE, Turner Prize nominee), Claudette Johnson and Ingrid Pollard. The conversations explore their memories of art education and early careers,their experiences in the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, and their responses to the exhibition Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain in 2011, a quarter of a century after the original installation at the ICA in 1985, to reflect upon the issues of race and gender over that period in terms of how Black artist women have collaborated, made art, organized and conversed despite the failure of the British art institutions to sustain, conserve and study their work. Specifically avoiding the classic form of the artist interview, this book draws on a methodology not used in art history before: Constructivist Grounded Theory, which arrives at new theories of how individuals experience the world and act in it through analysing discourse generated in informal but structured conversation that seeks to discover new knowledge, rather than to impose existing theoretical models or concepts on experience as delivered in speech. Voices of Art, Belonging and Resistance is an analysis of the structural racism of British art institutions as experienced by Black subjects, and it also inflects that larger issue specifically with issues of gender and sexuality. Avoiding the now much abused concept of intersectionality, the method allows the intricacies of race, class, gender and sexuality to be in play at all times across the accounts of life experience as artists of the subjects being interviewed and the analysis of the discourse thus generated and art historically and culturally analysed.