Within canonical histories of western portraiture, Black presence, Black subjectivity and Black agency have until very recently been overlooked, marginalized, dehumanized or at best ignored. Strategies for redress within recent art practices by a number of contemporary artists of colour have included work that positions the self in relation to history in order to raise a number of strategic questions about visibility and absence; work that refocuses the existence of Black presence within western portraits as poignant moments of pause and reflection; insertions of Black agency within existing western canons of historical representation and for many, the short-circuiting of traditional conventions of portraiture altogether in a new evocation of Blackness and being. As Zadie Smith has remarked, ‘Black selfhood has always existed and is not invisible to Black people.’ The idea of making Black presence visible is questioned by Smith amongst others, visible for whom? Indeed, in his thinking through what it means to articulate an ‘aesthetics of aliveness’, Kevin Quashie observes that it is only anti-Blackness that deems Black subjectivity invisible at all. This lecture considers then, the idea of choice in relation to the racialised conditions of art history. What choices are artists and art historians making within an academic discipline premised on whiteness and how can their choices shift the ground of anti-blackness from its centre?
Professor Dorothy Price FBA, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History
