In October 1982 the First National Black Art Convention – convened to discuss the Form, Functioning and Future of Black Art – was held at the Polytechnic in Wolverhampton. Organised by the midlands-based group of art students, Wolverhampton Young Black Artists (WYBA), included Claudette Johnson, who was then a student at the former Wolverhampton Polytechnic. During the convention Johnson, injected feminist critique into the convention’s discussion of black art. From the outset, her lecture and slide presentation was met with fierce criticism from the audience, which lasted the whole of her talk and into the question and answer session that followed it. In the discussion following the lecture, someone advocated that the women in the audience follow Johnson into a separate space for a women-only conversation. Away from the whole, the smaller group introduced themselves to one another and to each other’s art. Importantly, all of the women who met in Wolverhampton began making connections with other artists and with institutions in London. These interactions led to a network of artists that recognised the convention as an important development in their careers. This lecture will examine the ways in which Johnson’s presentation cohered the uneasy politics of race and feminism together at this moment for her own work as well as that of other artists.
In 2019, Courtney J. Martin became the sixth director of the Yale Center for British Art. Previously, she was the deputy director and chief curator at the Dia Art Foundation; an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University; an assistant professor in the History of Art department at Vanderbilt University; a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley; a fellow at the Getty Research Institute; and a Henry Moore Institute research fellow. She also worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York. In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
In 2012, Martin curated the exhibition Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip . . . Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973–1978 at Tate Britain. In 2014, she co-curated the group show Minimal Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contemporary Art at Rønnebæksholm in Denmark. From 2008 to 2015, she co-led a research project on the Anglo-American art critic Lawrence Alloway at the Getty Research Institute and was co-editor of Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty Publications, 2015, winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award). In 2015, she curated an exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation focused on the American painter Robert Ryman. At Dia, she also oversaw exhibitions of works by Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, Blinky Palermo, Dorothea Rockburne, Keith Sonnier, and Andy Warhol. In 2022, she organized the first survey of British painter, Bridget Riley’s work in America in over twenty years at the YCBA. She was editor of the book Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016), surveying an important collection of modern and contemporary work by artists of African descent.
She received a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College and a doctorate from Yale University for her research on twentieth-century British art. She is the author of essays on Rasheed Araeen, Kader Attia, Rina Banerjee, Frank Bowling, Lara Favaretto, Sam Gilliam, Leslie Hewitt, Jacqueline Humphries, Asger Jorn, Eva LeWitt, Wangechi Mutu, Ed Ruscha, and Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA).
Currently, she serves on the boards of the Chinati Foundation, Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Hauser and Wirth Institute and the Henry Moore Foundation.
Organised by Professor Dorothy Price (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History, The Courtauld) and Xiaojue Michelle Zhu (Doctoral Researcher, The Courtauld) as part of the 2023-24 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, ‘Black British Art: Histories, Presence, Futures’.