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Mother the Verb & Lxs Desaparecidxs (Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ivy Monteiro, Davia Amerasu Spain, Randy Reyes, Stephanie Hewett, Jose Abad, Emelia Martínez Brumbaugh, Felix (Sol) Linck Frenz, and Gabriel Christian).
Photo by Robbie Sweeny
Mother the Verb & Lxs Desaparecidxs (Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ivy Monteiro, Davia Amerasu Spain, Randy Reyes, Stephanie Hewett, Jose Abad, Emelia Martínez Brumbaugh, Felix (Sol) Linck Frenz, and Gabriel Christian).
Photo by Robbie Sweeny
Cerimónia no Monumento em homenagem à Diáspora Macaense por ocasião da Reunião Preliminar de 2003 para o Encontro de 2004, reunindo os presidentes das Casas de Macau e associações macaenses da diáspora e de Macau
Mother the Verb & Lxs Desaparecidxs (Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ivy Monteiro, Davia Amerasu Spain, Randy Reyes, Stephanie Hewett, Jose Abad, Emelia Martínez Brumbaugh, Felix (Sol) Linck Frenz, and Gabriel Christian).
Photo by Robbie Sweeny
Thomas Stuart Smith
Oil on canvas
Students, Models and Exhibitors
In archival records and works exhibited at the RA during the nineteenth century are traces of the lives of people present in different roles across the organisation. William Morrison Brown, a Jamaican-born student, was admitted to the RA’s Antique School in 1830. From the late 1850s, Jamaican-British model Fanny Eaton began to pose in the RA’s Life Room. Eaton was a sought-after model; the perceived ambiguity of her appearance as a woman of mixed European and African descent meant she was employed by artists to stand in for a variety of non-white figures in biblical or mythological scenes.
Notions of human difference were reinforced in nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific discourse accompanying the study of anatomy, another component of training at the RA Schools. The fallacy of racial hierarchy is parodied by Keith Piper’s ‘The Coloureds’ Codex: An Overseer’s Guide to Comparative Complexion’ (2007). Designed to look like a period artefact, it also resembles an artist’s paint box or evokes a cosmetics case with its pots of pigment ranging from white to brown.
To be a Black Briton in the nineteenth century meant navigating between shifting sands of personal independence and objectification. Paintings such as Stuart Smith’s ‘The Pipe of Freedom’, referring to the hard-won 1863 American Emancipation Proclamation for the enslaved, was rejected by the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition Selection Committee, while Long’s provocative ‘The Babylonian Marriage Market’ was a sensation of the 1875 exhibition.*
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
Mother the Verb & Lxs Desaparecidxs (Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ivy Monteiro, Davia Amerasu Spain, Randy Reyes, Stephanie Hewett, Jose Abad, Emelia Martínez Brumbaugh, Felix (Sol) Linck Frenz, and Gabriel Christian).
Photo by Robbie Sweeny