Framing the Critical Decade: After the Black Arts Movement

Convened by Dr. Dorothy Price and Dr. Elizabeth Robles

With generous support from the University of Bristol History of Art Department, the Transnational Modernisms Research Cluster, the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Art and the Bristol University Alumni Foundation

This conference aims to bring together scholars from across the humanities, critics and artists to engage questions around 'Black British-ness' and Black British creative production during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Often perceived, and dismissed, as a by-product of the social, critical and political milieu of the 1980s, the Black Arts Movement in Britain has been, until recently, largely packed away as something no longer relevant in a global, multicultural, even post-racial world. Building on and responding to a growing interest in reassessing the role of the Black Arts Movement in the construction of contemporary ideas around race, national identity, gender and aesthetics (see recent exhibitions such as Thin Black Line(s) (Tate, 2012), Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience (V&A and Black Cultural Archives, 2015) and Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain (Tate Liverpool, 2014) and the opening of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton), the conference asserts the continued and dynamic presence of the 'Critical Decade'.

It is the organisers' aim that by bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines – art, the history of art, visual culture, literature, history, critical theory and sociology, to name a few – the conference will yield new ways of thinking about narratives of creative production in Britain at the turn of the twenty-first century.


PROGRAM

21 March, 2016

10:30 – 11:00 Registration, Tea and Coffee

11:00 Welcome

11:00 – 12:10
Lubaina Himid (UCLan) in Conversation with Dorothy Price (Bristol) and Melanie Keen (Director, InIVA)

12:10 – 1:00 Lunch


Panel 1

1:00 – 1:20
Roshini Kempadoo,
'The 'burden' of photography: memory and history in photography, autographs and black portraits'

1:20- 1:40
Dhanveer Singh Brar,
'Black Secret Technology'

1:40 – 2:00
Ashwani Sharma,
'Writing Black Art'

2:00 – 2:30 Discussion


Panel 2

2.30 – 2:50
Ella S. Mills,
'Moments and Connections: Cultural Memory, Black Women's Creativity and the Folds of British Art History 1985-2011'

2:50-3:10
Davinia Gregory,
'The Drum Arts Centre: Blackness vs. interculture after the Black Arts Movement'

3:10-3:30
Lisa Anderson,
'Outside of the frame: Mobiling emerging Black British contemporary visual art practice in the digital age'

3:30 – 4:00 Discussion

4:00 – 4:15 Comfort break/Tea and Coffee

4:15– 6: 00
Helen Wilson Roe and Josie Gill (Bristol) (includes a viewing of Helen Wilson Roe's film A Brush with Immortality)

7:30 – 9:30
Delegates are invited to attend the Open Stage Event organized by the Association of Dance and the African Diaspora (ADAD) held in the Pegg Studio Theatre in the Bristol University Student Union.


Day Two

9:45 – 10 Registration with Tea and Coffee

Panel 3

10:00 – 10:40
Valda Jackson, TBC

10: 40 – 11:00
Shawn Sobers,
'What came first, the Black or the Arts? An autoethnography'

11:00 – 11:20
Yassmin Foster,
'The Black Dancing Body versus the Black dancing form'

11:20 – 11:40 Discussion

11:40 – 12:30 – Lunch


Panel 4

12:30 – 12:50
Alice Correia,
'Adventures Close to Home: Art and Contested Belongings in the 1980s'

12:50 – 1:10
Anjalie Dalal-Clayton,
'Keith Piper: Between Legacy Media, Cyberspace and the Corporeal'

1:10 – 1:30
Leon Wainwright,
'Phenomenal Difference: Toward a Philosophy of Black British Art'

1:30 - 2:00 Discussion


Panel 5

2:00 – 2:20
Mora Beauchamp-Byrd,
'The Transatlantic Afterlife of 'Transforming the Crown': Recent Curatorial Practice and Black British Art

2:20 – 2:40
James Smethurst and Rachel Rubin,
'Everything United Everyone Participating': John La Rose, New Beacon, US Black Arts and the Black Arts International

2:40 – 3:00
Jane Rhodes,
'The Visual Culture of Black Power Across the black Atlantic'

3:00 – 3:30 Discussion

3:30 – 3:45 Comfort Break with Tea and Coffee

3:45 – 4:45
Sonia Boyce

4:45 – 5:00 Closing Remarks

5:00 – 6:00 Wine Reception


Registration now open!
Conference fee: 25 GBP (concessions available)