Diversity in the Arts
At Rural Arts, we love to celebrate diversity in all its forms across the arts. This page, created in October 2020, will feature articles and signpost to useful resources, and will grow as we do.
Black History Month 2020
For Black History Month, we're spotlighting some fantastic artists, musicians, theatre companies as well as resources for Black creatives.
Theatre and Dance
Image: The Head Wrap Diaries by Uchenna Dance, streaming online 16th-22nd October via Rural Touring Dance Initiative.
Below are some links to Black theatre and dance companies, many of which are based in Yorkshire.
Artists
Learn about Black artists and the stories behind their work.
Lubaina Himid
Lubaina Himid CBE (born 1954) is a British artist and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities.
Himid was one of the first artists involved in the UK's Black Art movement in the 1980s and continues to create activist art which is shown in galleries in Britain, as well as worldwide. Himid was appointed MBE in June 2010 for "services to Black Women's Art" won the Turner Prize in 2017 and was made a CBE in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours "for services to art." (Bio via Wikipedia)
In the past we looked at the work of Lubaina Himid in our Art Club for ages 6-16. Inspired by her work, our young artists created their own cardboard cutouts, each depicting a famous artist's work. See it below.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988) was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture.
Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community of his time, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. Basquiat's visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. (Bio via Wikipedia)
Untitled, 1948 (source)
Video: Ted-Ed - The chaotic brilliance of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat - Jordana Moore Saggese
Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare CBE, RA (born 1962) is a British-Nigerian artist living in the United Kingdom. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. A hallmark of his art is the brightly coloured Ankara fabric he uses. Because he has a physical disability that paralyses one side of his body, Shonibare uses assistants to make works under his direction.
Shonibare's work explores issues of colonialism alongside those of race and class, through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, and, more recently, film and performance. He examines, in particular, the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mining Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. (Bio via Wikipedia)
Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (London, 2010) by Yinka Shonibare during its occupancy of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square (source)
Kara Walker
Kara Elizabeth Walker (born 1969) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, and film-maker who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work.
Walker is best known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. She has also produced works in gouache, watercolor, video animation, shadow puppets, "magic-lantern" projections, as well as large-scale sculptural installations like her ambitious public exhibition with Creative Time called A Subtlety (2014). The black and white silhouettes confront the realities of history, while also using the stereotypes from the era of slavery to relate to persistent modern-day concerns. Her exploration of American racism can be applied to other countries and cultures regarding relations between race and gender, and reminds us of the power of art to defy conventions. (Bio via Wikipedia)
Music
Listen to Black and British artists in this YouTube playlist by Vevo
Resources
Digital Arts Platform championed under represented creatives - For T'Culture
Black Gold Exhibition by Pinterest
Black Artists Grant by Creative Debuts
Opportunities for writers and illustrators of colour by Book Trust
Black British Visual Artists, an arts and education organisation
Events
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Black History Month Website - online and regional events
Tue 13th October, 2pm: Harrogate Library Facebook page - Unconscious Bias, a talk by Tina Shingler
Fri 16th - Thu 22nd October: Dance show The Head Wrap Diaries by Uchenna Dance streaming via Rural Touring Dance Initiative
Throughout October: Pinterest - Celebrating British Black History Month
