Paintings, drawing and sculptures created by Black artists come together at London's National Portrait Gallery as part of a major exploration into the portrayal of the Black figure in contemporary art.
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00:00 [MUSIC]
00:10 We're in a period right now where black artists are working at a level of
00:24 extraordinary proficiency and I've been celebrated and recognized
00:29 internationally at a level we've never seen in history before.
00:33 So the show is partly about marking this moment but it's also about
00:37 looking further than this. It's also about
00:40 looking through the eyes of the artists and the subjects in their work. It's also
00:46 an invitation into inquiry, an invitation into
00:51 what does black experience, black lived experience, black identity and being and
00:58 presence and history, what does this look like?
01:03 I've got two paintings here on display at the National Portrait Gallery today.
01:09 One of them is called Harriet Tubman en route to Canada and the other one is
01:13 called Nanny of the Maroons' Fifth Act of Mercy
01:17 and essentially they're sort of portrayals of two historic
01:22 black women, one from the Nanny of the Maroons from the 18th century Jamaica
01:28 and Harriet Tubman from 19th century America and both of them were sort of
01:33 activists, actually military commanders in the struggle against
01:37 slavery.
01:39 One could say that particularly since the
01:44 the murder of George Floyd and you know the widespread protests which took place
01:50 in the Black Lives Matter context, definitely the questions of race and
01:53 representation have sort of moved higher up the agenda of media and
01:57 culture but I think that we're still at the
02:02 the very earliest stages.
02:06 [Music]