I am currently undertaking a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for a project entitled 'Making Waves: Black Artists & 'Black Art' in Britain from 1963-1982'.

'Making Waves: Black Artists & ‘Black Art’ in Britain from 1963 – 1982’ is a three
year research project that will uncover and interpret a crucial period in the
fractured and unfinished history of Black artists in Britain and British art more
broadly. It will trace the history of African and Asian artists in Britain between the
1st Commonwealth Biennale (1963) and the First National Black Art Convention
(1982) and examine the development of discourses around the implications of and
possibilities for ‘Black Art’ in Britain. During this period, debates around the
intersections of race, nationality and aesthetics set against the background of,
what art historian Kobena Mercer has called, London’s ‘post- colonial
internationalism’ laid the foundations for what would become the British Black Arts
Movement of the 1980s. Bringing together oral histories, archival research and
the sustained visual engagement of iconology, this project will redress the extant
elision of pre-1980s voices from a still emerging narrative of Black creative
production in twentieth century Britain