New exhibition: Black Bloomsbury

UCL Art Museum, 23 September – 13 December 2013

The Equiano Centre’s Caroline Bressey and Gemma Romain have co-curated the UCL Art Museum’s autumn exhibition Black Bloomsbury which runs until 13 December.  Based upon research carried out as part of the AHRC-funded project Drawing over the Colour Line: Geographies of art and cosmopolitan politics in London, 1919 – 1939, the exhibition explores and documents the black presence in Bloomsbury from 1918 to 1948, highlighting the geographies of the Black presence in Bloomsbury and interwar politics including anti-colonial and anti-racist activism. The exhibition presents a small number paintings, drawings, and archival documents from UCL highlighting how this Black presence was represented in the artworks of Slade students from the period.  It features the work of Slade students Ivy MacKusick, Ann Tooth, Leila Leigh, JHM Innes, Denis Curry and Ernest Pascoe, and also displays Winifred Knights’ 1920 oil painting Portrait of a…