Professor Dorothy Price talks about her research into Claudette Johnson and Black British women artists
I have been interested in women artists for many decades and throughout my career, ever since I read Griselda Pollock and Deborah Cherry’s journal article, ‘Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature’ first published in Art History journal in 1984. I was teaching myself art history at school in the Midlands and the article offered an eye-opening feminist approach to rethinking the Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where I was a regular visitor. Taking Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) as their point of departure, Cherry and
Pollock put her back into the frame as a subject of representation, not just an over-determined image. Since then, I have always been interested in thinking more about women in art – as artists, as sitters, as patrons.
As a woman of colour studying a largely white canon of art history at university, I also became interested in the intersections of race and gender within visual representation. This led to a strand of my published research that has focused on Black British art and artists including Hew Locke, Lubna Chowdhary, Mohini Chandra, Sonia Boyce, Sutapa Biswas, Frank Bowling, Lubaina Himid and Claudette Johnson. Unfortunately, the academic climate of the 1990s when I began this research was not receptive to this field and whilst I knew it was significant, there was never really the opportunity to teach it very widely in the UK; at the time it was considered too niche. Thankfully this has changed more recently and now my work on women artists and artists of colour is able to take centre stage in my research, curating, thinking and teaching.
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