This lecture will reflect on recent developments in Black British Art with a focus on the work of Lubaina Himid and other artists of her generation. Over the course of a career spanning several decades, Himid has produced an extraordinary body of work in a variety of media in which the primacy of painting has remained to the fore. The use of colour, installation and collage in a re-address to history, to art history, to monuments, to time, to memory and to visibility, amongst other themes, are central to Himid’s practices as an artist; a practice in which she wrests painting from its traditional function as an instrument for white western canon formation and re-deploys it in a dialogical relation to its origins. Such a Benjaminian concept of history – as a constellation between past, present and future in which re-interrogating the past in the present might produce the conditions for change in the future – is one of the enduring qualities of her artistic practice and will be explored further in this lecture as part of a wider reflection on the remapping of the boundaries of British art and diasporic engagements with legacies of modernism.

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