The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester
21 October 2022 – 23 April 2023
Althea McNish: Colour is Mine at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, marks the first touring museum retrospective of works by Althea McNish (1924-2020), initially shown at the William Morris Gallery, London in 2021. Acclaimed for innovative textile designs which first gained visibility in commercial markets, the Whitworth show conveys the multifaceted nature of McNish’s practice by detailing a body of work whose remit stretches far beyond the commercial sphere. Reframing her forerunning achievements for a contemporary audience, the exhibition features an array of works that span varying sizes, motifs and media to signal the breath of the Trinidadian-born artist’s oeuvre.
Successful in the immediate wake of her postgraduate textile degree at the Royal College of Art (RCA), McNish would go on to produce designs in an imminently signature style characterised by vibrant hues and strikingly bold patterning. A substantial range of McNish’s eye-catching designs are on display in the exhibition, annotated with their provenance and production history, including commissions from renowned designers and retailers such as Liberty London, Dior, Heal’s and Cavendish Textiles. Golden Harvest (1957, Fig. 1) remains one of McNish’s most recognisable designs, a celebrated early work that resides in the collections of both the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Whitworth. The work enmeshes two botanical motifs: the silhouette of the wheat flower which McNish sighted on a sojourn in the Essex countryside as a student at the RCA, together with the tall, plentiful sugarcane plants recalled from her childhood in Trinidad. Imprinting this motif onto cotton satin coloured in an iconic fusion of burning tones of red, orange and yellow, Golden Harvest earmarks McNish’s artistic breakthrough. McNish merges potent specificities of past personal experiences with the immediacy and spirit of a new milieu. This articulation of her own unique diasporic experience sees cultural encounters of back-home and home-now conflated and hybridised in an inextricable new form. Golden Harvest garners attention as a touchstone work within the exhibition, a defining point of departure within the artist’s career that sets the tone for the rest of the show.
McNish’s prints, wallpapers, and paintings unfold over the course of three exhibition rooms charting the course of her career. The Whitworth has collated a significant number of works for this retrospective, along with ancillary archival material displayed to propound a well-rounded understanding of the artist’s expanded process. The exhibition conveys McNish’s progressive experimentation in colour and form largely by way of her chosen botanical motifs, highlighting the floral specimens that reappear throughout her work. However, the display of McNish’s works en masse occasionally compromises the otherwise cohesive rendering of her oeuvre. This decision to present numerous textiles and cloths together at times strays the exhibition into a aesthetic similar to that of a fabric shop displaying an array of samples varying in colour, pattern, and size.
Importantly, it is not only McNish’s work that is featured in this celebratory retrospective. While attesting to McNish’s prolific and ground-breaking output, the Whitworth exhibition additionally includes works by McNish’s contemporaries, friends, and teachers. In doing so, the exhibition fosters an expanded sense of milieu and community among artists who have often been positioned as singular, tangential figures in post-war British art history. Given McNish’s status as founding member of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), the Whitworth exhibition justifiably includes a selection of paintings and sculptures by fellow CAM members Winston Branch, Paul Dash, and Ronald Moody, respectively. Presenting these artists’ work in a position of primacy within a retrospective of Althea McNish points to a bold and exciting assertion of collaborative artistic spirit that characterised a post-war epoch in flux for diasporic artists in Britain. The Whitworth exhibition firmly places McNish’s practice within the context of this group, diverging from any attribution of her as a solitary figure that may denote a homogenised conception of Caribbean arts during the 1960s and 1970s. This section of Colour is Mine ensures Althea McNish is not only introduced as an unprecedented outlier in post-war British art, but also as an acclaimed component of a larger nexus of Caribbean artists whose concurrent achievements are symptomatic of a wider collaborative network of diasporic artists in Britain.
McNish’s work reached diverse and varied audiences at a time of minimal representation and opportunity for artists of colour in Britain. Christine Checinska suggests that McNish ‘injected much-needed colour and life’ into an austere post-war Britain.[1] Nonetheless, the wide-reaching trope of Caribbean proclivity for colour and vibrancy frames McNish through a particularly constricted lens. As one of the first Caribbean textile designers to attain international acclaim, much has been made of McNish’s ‘tropical frame of reference’.[2] Rather than relaying any scientific truths of specific geographical region, the term ‘tropics’ was originally employed by early European colonists as a loose, abstract ideation of a place characterised by a meteorological propensity for heat and moisture.[3] The exhibition press release and wall texts found throughout the gallery rooms note that McNish described herself as observing and conveying her surroundings in Britain through a ‘tropical eye’.[4] However, there is a remaining tension emanating from an exhibition that frames this reference in a way which continues to propel a homogenising conception of a uniquely multilingual and culturally diverse region. The tropicalisation and subsequent othering of the Caribbean and Caribbean artists’ work has consistently limited its visibility as a region, placing artists outside of dominant narratives of modern and contemporary art. As such, prefiguring McNish’s oeuvre as definitively ‘tropical’ may further distance the artist from a centralised position within global art history for which the retrospective strives.
Colour is Mine is a multifaceted, timely exhibition that celebrates the adaptive nature of a trailblazing artist. It contextually unpacks and gives institutional space to an impressively expansive yet little attended-to oeuvre. The exhibition manages to shine a steadfast light on the artist’s numerable and wide-reaching success while beginning to unfurl and question the entangled, nebulous histories of post-war textile design and art through McNish’s work. Althea McNish: Colour is Mine buttresses the manifold legacies of a pioneering artist whose work shines through in this overdue museum show.
Citations
[1] Christina Checinska, ‘Althea McNish and the British-African Diaspora’, in Anne Massey and Alex Seago (eds) Pop Art and Design(London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 73.
[2] John Weiss, ‘Althea McNish in conversation with John Weiss (22 February1999) with John La Rose in the chair’, in Roxy Harris and Sarah White (eds), Building Britannia: Life Experience with Britain (London: New Beacon Books, 2009), 91.
[3] Martin Mahony and Endfield, Georgina, ‘Climate and Colonialism’, WIREs Climate Change, 9, 2 (2018), 2-4, https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.510, doi:10.1002/wcc.510. [19 June 2023]
[4] “Everything I did, I saw through a tropical eye.” Althea McNish quoted in 2015. ‘Althea McNish: Colour is Mine’, The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester (press release, issued 1 September 2022, accessed 21 June 2023, https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=63866)