And I Have My Own Business In This Skin, Claudette Johnson (1982) (EMPIRE LINES x The Courtauld Gallery)

Curator Dorothy Price outlines the figures of Claudette Johnson, a founder member of the Black British Arts Movement (Blk Art Group), and one of the first ‘post-colonials’ practicing in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and the Midlands from the 1980s to now.

Ever so-slightly-larger than-life, Claudette Johnson’s drawings of Black figures reflect the status of their artist. A founding member of the Black British Arts Movement or Blk Art Group in the 1980s, she was a leading figure in a politically-charged creative community - called the first ‘post-colonials’ by Stuart Hall, for being born and raised in Britain. Johnson worked closely with fellow ‘post-Windrush’ contemporaries include Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper, Ingrid Pollard and Maud Sulter, Marlene Smith and Lubaina Himid - but her work has been relatively underrepresented.

As the artist’s first public monographic exhibition opens in London, curator Dorothy Price talks about her practice in the Wolverhampton Young Black Artists Group - which predated the YBAs - and formative speech in the First National Black Arts Conference in 1982. Dorothy shares personal insights from the groundbreaking ICA exhibition, The Thin Black Line, and Claudette’s complex position as a Black European artist of African and Caribbean descent. Drawing on the Courtauld’s permanent collection, we see the artist’s work with African masks, sculptures, and conventional representations of Black women, challenging the colonial foundations of Western European modernism, and reappropriating the ‘primitivism’ of the likes of Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin to state her place in art history. We also discuss her contemporary practice, and how the history of the Black British Arts Movement can decentre the contemporary ‘Brixtonisation’ of the singular Black experience, drawing attention to cities in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and the Midlands.

Claudette Johnson: Presence runs at the Courtauld Gallery in London until 14 January 2023. For more, you can read my article.

For more about Keith Piper, hear curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery on Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (2023) at the Fitzwilliam Museum on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/a5271ae2bc8c85116db581918412eda2

For more on Ingrid Pollard, hear the artist on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4

For more about the ‘Brixtonisation’ of the Black British experience, listen to artist Johny Pitts on Home is Not A Place (2021-Now) at The Photographers’ Gallery on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/70fd7f9adfd2e5e30b91dc77ee811613

For more on Hurvin Anderson, hear Hepworth Wakefield curator Isabella Maidment on his Barbershop (2006-2023) series on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/5cfb7ddb525098a8e8da837fcace8068

Recommended reading:

• On Lubaina Himid: gowithyamo.com/blog/the-revolutionary-act-of-walking-in-the-city
• On Maud Sulter: gowithyamo.com/blog/reclaiming-visual-culture-black-venus-at-somerset-house
• On Sonia Boyce: gowithyamo.com/blog/feeling-her-way-sonia-boyces-noisy-exhibition
• On Life Between Islands at Tate Britain: artmag.co.uk/the-caribbean-condensed-life-between-islands-at-the-tate-britain/

WITH: Professor Dorothy Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld, London. She is also Editor of Art History, journal of the Association for Art History, and founder of the Tate/Paul Mellon Centre’s British Art Network subgroup on Black British Art. Dorothy is the co-curator of Presence.

ART: ‘And I Have My Own Business In This Skin, Claudette Johnson (1982)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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