Vanishing Point 18 (Titian), 2020
Barbara Walker
Graphite on embossed paper
The title of Walker’s “Vanishing Point” series refers both to the artistic technique of linear perspective, used in Old Master paintings, and the lost identities of Black figures in such works.
Here, Walker re-situates Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556–59) – a scene inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Using detailed drawing and blind intaglio printing, Walker uses processes akin to erasure to address, in her words, “a compelling absence of Black representation in our national archives and, by extension, in the collective memory of British society”.*
Prints and Poetry
At the turn of the nineteenth century, printmaking and poetry played a greater role in the public appreciation of art, especially as literacy rates increased and prints became cheaper. The aesthetic norms of Neoclassicism continued to underpin visual and literary traditions. Born in Senegambia, Phillis Wheatley wrote poems while enslaved in Boston; in 1773 she became the first African American to publish a volume of poetry, printed in London. Her poem “Niobe” responds to Richard Wilson’s classical landscape scene; both works refer to verses by the Roman poet Ovid.
Amid public discourse in Britain, artists created both abolitionist and pro-slavery imagery. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the trade in enslaved people but not the practice of enslavement, the gradual cessation of which began with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Thomas Stothard’s 1794 design ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies’ appeared in a book that presented the trade in enslaved African people as humane. The image recasts the horrors of the Middle Passage – the forced journey of the enslaved across the Atlantic Ocean in European slave ships – as a Black goddess riding a shell chariot, admired by Neptune, who is waving the Union Jack.
Artists and writers including Margaret Burroughs and Kara Walker have responded to Stothard’s unsettling image. Robin Coste Lewis’s 2015 poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus”, an excerpt of which is presented here, is composed of descriptions of Western art objects dating from 38,000 BCE to the present, in which a Black female figure is present.*
From the exhibition
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change
(February - April 2024)
‘Entangled Pasts’ explores connections between art associated with the Royal Academy of Arts and Britain’s colonial histories. At its founding by artists in 1768, under King George III, the institution’s first President, Joshua Reynolds, called the RA an ‘ornament’ to Britain’s empire. For over 250 years, artists and architects active in Britain have experienced and expressed divergent relationships to imperial histories. Individually, through families and via patrons, the links are innumerable and entwined. Today, the legacies of colonial histories continue to form part of the fabric of everyday life, physically and emotionally, across social, economic, cultural and political fields both national and global.
Works of art have always been agents of change, flashpoints of debate and producers of fluctuating meanings. A painting, sculpture, drawing, print, film or poem can act as a powerful lens through which complex situations can be viewed and nuanced understandings of them can emerge. ‘Entangled Pasts’ brings together 100 artworks to explore the role of art in shaping narratives of empire, colonialism, enslavement, resistance, abolition and indenture. An exhibition on this vast and complex subject is necessarily a partial, fragmentary view. Moments of history are refracted through the eyes of artists, especially contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas.
These artworks can represent only a fraction of the institution’s colonial links and the unfolding legacies of British colonialism around the world. Yet, in the visual and conceptual resonances between them, there exists a space for contemplation, inquiry, acknowledgement, reflection, imagination and ongoing conversations..
[*Royal Academy]
Taken at the Royal Academy
Vanishing Point 18 (Titian), 2020
Barbara Walker
Graphite on embossed paper
The title of Walker’s “Vanishing Point” series refers both to the artistic technique of linear perspective, used in Old Master paintings, and the lost identities of Black figures in such works.
Here, Walker re-situates Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (1556–59) – a scene inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Using detailed drawing and blind intaglio printing, Walker uses processes akin to erasure to address, in her words, “a compelling absence of Black representation in our national archives and, by extension, in the collective memory of British society”.*
Prints and Poetry
At the turn of the nineteenth century, printmaking and poetry played a greater role in the public appreciation of art, especially as literacy rates increased and prints became cheaper. The aesthetic norms of Neoclassicism continued to underpin visual and literary traditions. Born in Senegambia, Phillis Wheatley wrote poems while enslaved in Boston; in 1773 she became the first African American to publish a volume of poetry, printed in London. Her poem “Niobe” responds to Richard Wilson’s classical landscape scene; both works refer to verses by the Roman poet Ovid.
Amid public discourse in Britain, artists created both abolitionist and pro-slavery imagery. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the trade in enslaved people but not the practice of enslavement, the gradual cessation of which began with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Thomas Stothard’s 1794 design ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies’ appeared in a book that presented the trade in enslaved African people as humane. The image recasts the horrors of the Middle Passage – the forced journey of the enslaved across the Atlantic Ocean in European slave ships – as a Black goddess riding a shell chariot, admired by Neptune, who is waving the Union Jack.
Artists and writers including Margaret Burroughs and Kara Walker have responded to Stothard’s unsettling image. Robin Coste Lewis’s 2015 poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus”, an excerpt of which is presented here, is composed of descriptions of Western art objects dating from 38,000 BCE to the present, in which a Black female figure is present.*
From the exhibition
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change
(February - April 2024)
‘Entangled Pasts’ explores connections between art associated with the Royal Academy of Arts and Britain’s colonial histories. At its founding by artists in 1768, under King George III, the institution’s first President, Joshua Reynolds, called the RA an ‘ornament’ to Britain’s empire. For over 250 years, artists and architects active in Britain have experienced and expressed divergent relationships to imperial histories. Individually, through families and via patrons, the links are innumerable and entwined. Today, the legacies of colonial histories continue to form part of the fabric of everyday life, physically and emotionally, across social, economic, cultural and political fields both national and global.
Works of art have always been agents of change, flashpoints of debate and producers of fluctuating meanings. A painting, sculpture, drawing, print, film or poem can act as a powerful lens through which complex situations can be viewed and nuanced understandings of them can emerge. ‘Entangled Pasts’ brings together 100 artworks to explore the role of art in shaping narratives of empire, colonialism, enslavement, resistance, abolition and indenture. An exhibition on this vast and complex subject is necessarily a partial, fragmentary view. Moments of history are refracted through the eyes of artists, especially contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas.
These artworks can represent only a fraction of the institution’s colonial links and the unfolding legacies of British colonialism around the world. Yet, in the visual and conceptual resonances between them, there exists a space for contemplation, inquiry, acknowledgement, reflection, imagination and ongoing conversations..
[*Royal Academy]
Taken at the Royal Academy