14 January 2022 The Guardian WeeklyCulture 55
ArtS
hortly after Margaret Thatcher became
prime minister in May 1979, Eddie Cham-
bers made an artwork called Destruction
of the National Front. The 19-year-old
student in Wolverhampton reconfi gured the
union jack as a swastika, before tearing it into
fragments across four panels. The image stands
as a defi ant rebuke to a resurgent far right, evoking
the anger many Black Britons felt at the time.
The work was emblematic of the Blk Art
Group, a radical association of young Black artists
founded by Chambers in 1979. The group aimed
to combat racism while promoting a distinctly
Black British political identity. Although it only
lasted fi ve years , the group casts a long shadow
over British art through its infl uence on genera-
tions of Black artists.
Keith Piper met Chambers in 1979 while study-
ing at what is now Wolverhampton School of
Art. “I overheard him talking about a show,” he
says, referring to Black Art An’ Done. “I thought,
‘He’s very serious.’ But we had a lot in common
because we were the only two Black students
on the course.”Chambers quickly set about recruiting Black
students from art schools in the West Midlands.
“Eddie was a great organiser,” says Piper, “but
we all had our own specifi c creative concerns.”
The group’s work features in a new exhibition
at Tate Britain, Life Between Islands, which
focuses on the work of British artists of Caribbean
heritage. Life Between Islands was co-curated by
the director of Tate Britain, Alex Farquharson ,
and David A Bailey, an artist and contemporary
of the Blk group. You can see how their work
infl uenced subsequent generations, not least
the Black Young British Artists (YBAs) Chris Ofi li,
Yinka Shonibare and Steve McQueen.
Chambers, now a professor of art history and
African diaspora art at the University of Texas at
Austin, epitomised Blk’s political approach. How
Much Longer You Bastards, from 1983, directly
challenged the activities of Barclay s bank in
South Africa at a time when Margaret Thatcher
was refusing to impose sanctions on the apart-
heid regime. The collage features the bank’s logo
alongside pages from the Financial Times and
a widely publicised image of parents carrying
their dead child after the 1976 Soweto uprising.
The group’s work was always rooted in the
politics of the era. “ The far right on the rise , anti-
apartheid, Greenham Common , policing, the
New Cross Fire. It was a very politicised time –
and that was core to my perspective as a young
Black man ,” Piper says.
This febrile atmosphere was evident in the
reception the group received. They were imme-
diately polarising: a breath of fresh air in some
quarters, an unwelcome source of aggrava-
tion in others. “We were surrounded by a lot
of reactionary forces, people who were openly
hostile,” says Piper. At a 1983 showing of The
Pan-Afrikan Connection at the Herbert in Cov-
entry, complaints from a security guard about
the exhibition’s subject matter forced the gallery
to erect a warning notice outside the entrance:
“Not suitable for people under 18.” Even on the
left, the group’s work was largely dismissed. A
note left in the visitors’ book read: “Angry. Too
angry ... more Marxist approach needed.” In the
Guardian, Irene McManus wrote: “Their work is
really just a collection of political posters.”
But some Blk members are now considered
innovative. Donald Rodney , who died in 1998
at just 36, was a leading fi gure. In the House of
My Father is a closeup photograph of Rodney’s
hand. In his palm is a tiny sculpture of a house
made of pieces of his own skin. Rodney suff ered
from sickle cell anaemia, an extremely painful
blood condition that is particularly common in
people of African or Caribbean heritage.
The artist and curator Marlene Smith was
18 when she joined the group. “We were very
coherent, both in terms of our pan-Africanism
but also in wanting to make Black lives visible.
There was a lot of protest in the work but what’s
overlooked sometimes is the humanity.”
Pan-Africanism – the idea that African‘Like storming
the citadel’
By Alex Mistlin
▲ The Spirit of the
Carnival (1982)
by Tam Joseph
WOLVERHAMPTON ART
GALLERY
Young Black British
artists were doing it for
themselves in the 1980s.
Now work that inspired
new generations is being
showcased in London