BAM - Black Artists and Modernism (Re-submission)

Artists of African and Asian descent have been making art in the UK at least since the early twentieth century. However, despite this longstanding situation, a problem exists where art criticism continues to serve the art-works of these artists inadequately. A peculiar kind of eclipsing has taken place where instead of considering and talking directly about the work, the discussions have emphasised the ethnicity of the artist, and the general problematics of race and identity politics within the art establishment, thus deflecting attention away from how these art-works relate to or have influenced the story of twentieth century art.

Coalesced under the term 'Black-British', this term can be considered as 'a metaphor for a political circumstance prescribed by struggles against economic exploitation and cultural domination: a state of consciousness that people of various pigmentations have experienced, empathized with, and responded to.' (Powell, 1997: 10) Here, the research will aim to elucidate a critical perspective on the complexities of trying to draw essentialist conclusions about the nature of a practice on the basis of national origin or diasporic affiliation.

Black Artists and Modernism, BAM for short, is a 3-year research programme that will investigate the often-understated connections as well as points of conflict between Black-British artists' practice and the art-works' relationship to modernism. Here, the research sees modernism as an unfinished project that is extended in postmodernism, and it will look at what Stuart Hall calls the "conjuncture" of generations of Black-British artists that were 'for' and 'against' modernist dictates.

By focussing our attention on art-works held in major public collections as well as key exhibitions, the research is designed to reach a wide audience from students and academics to a more general audience for the arts.

The design of the research will produce a wide-range of materials. These include:

An online multi-media website that will chronicle a national audit of art-works by Black-British artists held in public collections in the UK.

A series of essays, interviews and videos that discuss key art-works and their inclusion in important collections, as well as historically important exhibitions.

A series of public discussions will gather in places like Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, London and Paris. Study days and symposia will be focused on signature art-works and exhibition histories looking at the impact of Black-British art on the broader narratives of modern and contemporary art practice.

New displays will appear at museums like the Tate, as a way to re-think the connection between the art-work and the story of modernism. Working with Illuminations, the arts and media specialists renowned for their arts programming (including the Turner Prize programmes on Channel Four), the aim is to record the unfolding research process. Documentaries will be made for a variety of public media platforms including broadcast television. At the end of the three-year programme an edited book 'The Blackness of Modernism: reconsidering art-works, exhibitions and collecting the work of Black-British artists' will be published by Duke University Press.

The Blackness of Modernism: reconsidering art-works, exhibitions and collecting the works of Black British artists book, and the TV/documentary are both important outcomes, for different reasons. The book is the main academic outcome and the documentary is the main dissemination and impact outcome.

The Blackness of Modernism book will address the work of Black-British artists and asks how the art-works function beyond the frame of identity politics and institutional requirements of public engagement to encourage a reconsideration of modernism itself. The calibre of contributors would seek to include: Sarat Maharaj, Kobena Mercer, Courtney J Martin, David A Bailey, John Law, Lubaina Himid, Andrew Dewdney, Yinka Shonibare, Wenny Teo, Guy Brett, Sharon MacDonald, Irit Rogoff, Richard J Powell, Victoria Walsh, Gilane Tawadros and Sara Wajid.

BAM will benefit academics and students working in the fields of art practice, art history, visual studies, curatorial and museum studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies, gender and queer studies, and cultural studies. It is envisaged that artists, curators and cultural critics will benefit from the discussions that emerge during the public discussions (study days and symposia), as well as through the documents published on the BAM website, the broadcast documentary and the concluding book.

Through working with the Public Catalogue Foundation on the National Audit, the BAM database of entries will form hyper-links with the 'BBC Your Paintings' website, as well as contribute to the book.

Through the Curatorial and Museological strands a series of curated displays of art-works in public collections like the Tate, will benefit those museums and the audiences they serve.

BAM will have an intellectual and social impact on academia by providing greater critical resources to affect positive change in a culture of poor attainment differences between black and white students. There will be a considerable amount of original material in a field of practice that has been under-researched.

The Monographic and Documentary strands will generate learning resources that will be made accessible on the BAM website and will be developed as case studies in the publication. Social-media links to the BAM website will encourage active dialogues and feedback on the BAM programme.

At an extended level, the television documentary will aim to reach a significant audience, with the aim of uncovering the rich contributions that artists of African and Asian descent have made to twentieth century art: the building of this research will be a social asset to the wider community.

The effectiveness of the research programme will be evaluated by an Advisory Panel who will meet a total of seven times throughout the 3-years. The Advisory Panel will be made up of arts professionals and academics.

The planned public discussions (study days and symposia) will test the robustness of the research strands. There will be ten public events in years one and two of the programme, taking place across the UK and culminating in a symposium in France. The practices and discussions that have occurred in the UK, particularly since the post-war period, are internationally viewed as paradigm-shifting. As such the symposium in France will seek to exploit and extend these debates with academics and cultural commentators across Europe.

At the beginning of the research the team will receive oral history training to learn about the technical, theoretical and ethical issues concerned with documenting lived experience. Each researcher is expected to upload interviews (audio or transcripts) to the BAM website.

The research team will also work with Karen di Franco to set up a database for the National Audit entries. Karen will advise on the database architecture, and the structuring of the data-sets.