Drawing over the Colour Line: geographies of art and cosmopolitan politics in London 1919 - 1939

The influence of the Harlem Renaissance - when African-Americans created a revolution in music, art and literature in New York - has become an important element in understanding cultural, social and political change in New York, as well as in European cities such as Paris and Amsterdam in the 1920s and 1930s.

Like New York and Paris interwar London played host to the meetings of many intellectuals, students and workers in the realms of anti-colonial, nationalist and Pan-African politics, to name just a few examples. The extent to which the Black and Asian actors who initiated these political and social debates influenced new artistic practices and forms in the city is not yet understood.

This project will recover the lives of Black and Asian men and women who worked as artists and artists' models in London between 1919 and 1939 and seeks to understand the role they played in the changing artistic, social, cultural and political scenes that emerged in interwar London. Examining the archives of art collections as well as personal papers, autobiographies and memoirs, it will reconstruct the historical geographies of these men and women, their friends, colleagues, and the spaces they inhabited. These places included social meeting places in Soho such as the Florence Mills club and social and political clubs such as the socialist International Club in Shoreditch.

In particular the project will ask:

1. What was the relationship between artists who depicted cosmopolitan life in their art and Black and Asian activists who were living and working in the city?

2. What were the life experiences of Black and Asian sitters? How did the personal relationships between artists and sitters influence these experiences?

3. To what extent were activists influenced by artists in the formation and expression of their political ideas?

4. How have Black and Asian artists and sitters been remembered and forgotten in public memory and art historiography?

We will produce a number of outputs from the research. In addition to academic papers, two exhibition displays using material from the research will be held. A database of the material recovered will be made available via the UCL Equiano Centre website, and images (where available) provided with contextual information with an online gallery. In addition an online map with the location of people and places (such as art schools and studios, clubs and private homes) will be mapped and annotated as a walk. This will be available to download from the website and will also be given as a guided walk to those who are unable to attend the guided walks in London.

By advancing the understanding of the relationship between art and cosmopolitan identities between the Wars, the outcomes of this research will be of interest to a range of audiences including academics, curators, heritage practitioners and community scholars researching the Black and Asian presence in Britain.

In addition to the academic research community a number of public communities and public sector bodies will benefit from the research, primarily: Community Scholars, art galleries and archives and their visitors, sixth form students and their teachers, and local communities and members of the general interested in the diverse histories of London.

These audiences will benefit from a range of targeted research outputs:

1 Research publications
2 A database freely available for non-commercial research
3 An Online exhibition with annotated materials
4 Object based teaching material
5 Exhibitions and a walking tour

The outputs of the project will make an important contribution to scholarship on the black presence in Britain, work which is primarily undertaken by researchers who are based outside the academy. As a result they do not usually enjoy easy access to academic journals or other academic publications. To ensure they are aware of the research avenues and outputs of the project Dr Caroline Bressey and Dr Gemma Romain will work with the Black Cultural Archives, London (BCA) and the Black and Asian Studies Association (BASA) to ensure these scholars are informed of the material that is recovered through talks and seminars, BASA Jiscmail list and the BASA Newsletter (currently published x3 a year). In addition copies of academic publications, the exhibition catalogues/information leaflets and other published outputs will be deposited with the BCA library.

The archives targeted for research by the project will benefit from enhanced interpretations of their collections as a result of the original research taking place. The material identified through the research process will be collated into a database and each archive will be given an electronic and hard copy of the catalogue, highlighting cross-cutting themes relevant to their collections. In addition the database, which will give details of objects (such as works of art and their provenance, relevant political journals, diaries as well as highlighting links between objects) and details of how researchers may access them will be provided via the UCL Equiano Centre website - www.ucl.ac.uk/equianocentre.

Based on the material on the database, an online exhibition will consist of digitalised images with supporting narratives on targeted objects from the database. Some of these digital objects will also form the basis of an online workshop that will be developed for sixth form students with the UCL Strang Print Room, a study centre with access to the UCL Art Collections and a gallery with a public exhibition programme. Accompanying teacher's notes developed with colleagues at City and Islington College will be available to download from the UCL Equiano Centre website.

Two exhibitions are planned to be curated during the life of the project. A small exhibition will display student work inspired by prints, paintings and other objects relevant to the project held at the UCL Strang Print Room in 2012, and a display of artworks is planned to be shown at Tate Britain in 2013 (see letter of support attached). Both exhibitions will have an annotated catalogue and/or information leaflet. The Walking tour will be developed by Dr Romain. It will be modelled on a walk Exploring London's Black History, which Romain created in 2008 and will enable the general public to engage with the many sites including those which no longer exist such as The Florence Mills Club, a haunt of black intellectuals during the 1930s. An online version of the walk will be developed through a google mash-up to enable access for those who wish to undertake the walk themselves. This map will be hosted on the Equiano Centre website and follow a similar design for that created for Black Londoners 1800-1900 developed by Dr Bressey. An application for a small UCL public engagement grant