Tate Exhibition to Explore Gallery’s Links to Caribbean Slave Trade
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The curator of Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art says institutions must take responsibility for the past.
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Lubaina Himid’s Three Architects (Credit to Guy Bell/REX/Shutterstock)
British institutions must take responsibility for their history of benefiting from slavery, The Guardian quoted the curator of a new landmark exhibition of Caribbean-British art at Tate Britain as saying.
Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s - Now features artists working across film, photography, painting, sculpture, and fashion. They include those of Caribbean heritage and those inspired by the Caribbean.
David A Bailey, the exhibition’s curator and a member of the British Black Arts Movement, said in many ways, it explored Tate Britain’s own multi-colored past.
The original Tate collection was funded in the late 19th century by industrialist Sir Henry Tate, who made his fortune as a sugar refiner – a trade inextricably linked to slave labor in the Caribbean.
“It’s trying to think about the question of the museum and its responsibilities in a 21st-century climate, particularly museums which have a very chequered history around patronage,” Bailey said. “That has now resurfaced itself around the question of post-slavery and the sugar industry, which is referred to in some of the works in the show."
“For me, one of the things our institutions have to do is take responsibility around those questions and think about what is the legacy of these elements in the future.”
The exhibition begins with artists of the Windrush generation who went to Britain in the 1950s, and explores the Caribbean Artists Movement, an informal group of creatives including Paul Dash and Althea McNish, whose tropical modernist textile designs were inspired by the Caribbean landscape.
Several works, such as Horace Ové’s photographs, show the rise of the Black Power movement in Britain. The exhibition also includes a new version of The Front Room by Michael McMillan’s, a reconstruction of a fictional 1970s interior, evoking the role of home as a safe place for social gatherings at a time of widespread prejudice.
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Horace Ové Stokely Carmichael giving a Black Power speech (Photograph: © Horace Ové)
These are themes that society is still trying to deal with today, Bailey said. “Major European powers have a post-colonial history. Different generations emerge, and those baggages get taken on and they resurface. That will never go away.”
Bailey added, "With conversations around anti-racism gaining momentum following the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 and ongoing efforts to repatriate looted artifacts to their place of origin, now was the ideal time for this exhibition."
“It is a moment for our national spaces to think about what it is they’re trying to do.”
He hoped the exhibition would attract new and diverse communities to Tate Britain, while normal visitors “will now see a different sensibility around British art.”
“The Tate bookshop is flooded with books from the period,” he added. “When we were going to university, we could name on one hand the number of books [by Black writers and artists] that we could refer to. Now there are so many.”
