Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (2023) (EMPIRE LINES x Fitzwilliam Museum)

Curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery locate Cambridge within the transatlantic slave trade, connecting global commodities and local consumption, historic and contemporary art, to reveal how five hundred years of colonial resistance constructed new cultures, known as the Black Atlantic.

Between 1400 and 1900, European empires colonised much of the Americas, transporting over 12.5 million people to these colonies from Africa as slaves. It’s a history often recounted as something singular, concluded in the past - detached as happening ‘then, and over there’ - else told from the perspective of imperial powers. But in their resistance of colonial slavery, people also produced new cultures that continue to shape our present. Black Atlantic, a new exhibition at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, reconnects the institution’s collection, university, and city more widely with these global histories. Installed within the Founder’s Galleries, part-funded by the profits from the transatlantic slave trade, it builds on the ‘grandeur and smugness’ of the Fitzwilliam’s architecture - an intervention which asks whether it is possible to decolonise museums, as imperial infrastructures.

Co-curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery consider contrasts and continuities between historic and modern works, with contemporary Black artists like Barbara Walker and Keith Piper, Alberta Whittle and Donald Locke commenting on visibility, racism, and colourism, and how visual representations of Black people have shifted over time. Vicky smashes stereotypes about abolitionism, ceramics, and popular culture, from the UK’s largest pro-slavery punch bowl, to Jacqueline Bishop’s new Wedgwood dinner set. Plus, with a botanical painting from a Caribbean plantation - one of the first signed works by a Black artist of a Black subject - we travel between environments in West Africa, North and South America, and Europe, finding examples of exploitation, agency, and self-liberation - and pathways to future ‘repair’.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance runs at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge until 7 January 2024, the first in a series of exhibitions and gallery interventions planned until 2026.

For more on the South Sea Bubble, listen to Dr. Helen Paul on ⁠The Luxborough Gallery on Fire (c. 18th Century)⁠: ⁠https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/c02b6b82097b9ce34d193c771f772152

Part of EMPIRE LINES at 90, exploring the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade through contemporary art.

WITH: Dr. Jake Subryan Richards, Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Victoria Avery, Keeper of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum. They are co-curators of Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance.

ART: ‘The Coloureds’ Codex, Keith Piper (2023); Vanishing Point 25 (Costanzi), Barbara Walker (2021); Breadfruit Tree, John Tyley (1793-1800); History of the Dinner Table, Jacqueline Bishop (2021)’.

IMAGE: Installation View.

SOUNDS: Jacqueline Bishop: History at the Dinner Table. Produced by Storya.co. With special thanks to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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