'Connecting Thin Black Lines' Revisits British Art History

If history offers any consolation, it’s that one day, someone else might live off the spoils of a previous generation’s sacrifices and achievements. That it might become possible to take for granted the opportunities afforded to you as a Black woman; for the relative ease with which you move through the world to become so habitual, so routine, that its absence cannot be admitted to thought.

Take the art world. Since 2020, it has been widely acknowledged that global Black art is on the rise. Journalists and collectors flock to art fairs across the African continent: 1-54 in Marrakech, Art X in Lagos, the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. Black figurative art, in particular, has been steadily collected and exhibited. Artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Amoako Boafo are among the biggest names in contemporary art. The art world is paying attention to, and profiting from, Black artists – and in this climate it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way.

This summer at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), ‘Connecting Thin Black Lines, 1985–2025’, a major group exhibition and event programme curated by Lubaina Himid, provides a useful corrective to forgetfulness of the past and its attendant struggles. The show comes 40 years after ‘The Thin Black Line’ – an exhibition also curated by Himid – opened at the ICA, bringing together Black and Asian British women artists whose works were maligned by traditional galleries and art institutions. The 1985 exhibition, held in the gallery concourse, was a slip of a thing. By contrast, ‘Connecting Thin Black Lines’ is given the ICA’s full exhibition space, presenting a generous selection of work by each of the original artists: Brenda Agard, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Jennifer Comrie, Himid, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, Marlene Smith and Maud Sulter.

Some of these names are now familiar to us. Johnson, a founding member of the British Black arts movement, had a major exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, in 2023–24. Boyce represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2022 – the first Black woman to do so. Himid, who received a Tate Modern retrospective in 2022, will be Britain’s representative at Venice next year. These successes are not insignificant – but ‘Connecting Thin Black Lines’ is not a victory tour, nor is it another exhibition that simply seeks to represent Black artists. Himid has curated a show that attempts to look forwards and back, taking in projects from the last four decades alongside newly commissioned works. This stages a kind of confrontation between the past and present of these prolific artists – one that asks how we might historicize and remember the erasure of Black women from cultural spaces, in a context where there is more room for Black artists than ever before.

Much of the work in the show is displayed in the ICA’s large lower gallery. Here we find Johnson’s ‘Trilogy’ (1982–86), a series of three watercolour, gouache and pastel works on paper. Johnson began the triptych with Woman in Black as an undergraduate art student at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1982. The sitter was a friend, whom she instructed to pose in a way that would take up as much space as possible. She holds her hands behind her neck, her elbows splayed to fill the width of the canvas. Johnson later created Woman in Blue, featuring fellow artist Pollard, and Woman in Red, whose sitter is Agard – another participant in the British Black arts movement, whose photograph of a Black woman gazing coyly over her shoulder is also exhibited here (Untitled, 1985). Johnson’s triptych, which captures members of a community of artists in 1980s London, feels like a mirror held up to the other works on display: in her paintings we see one Black woman observing, with admiration, her peers.

Also on view is Boyce’s Rice n Peas (1982), a pastel self-portrait of the artist wearing a colourful headscarf and holding a spoon to her mouth, set against a background of floral wallpaper. The lower third of the work, however, is left blank, save for the handwritten words: ‘Gonga peas and rice, coco dumplings / sweet potato, green bananas, fried chicken / My mother used to shout at me every mealtime because I ate so little, and so slowly / … She was worried because I was so thin.’ It’s a quietly powerful piece about Black British domestic life and consumption that brings to mind the ways food can mimic or allegorize notions of primitivism and exoticism in British society.

One of the most distinctive works in the show is Sutapa Biswas’s Birdsong (2004), a video work staged in an adjoining room. It features a young Indian boy in a tastefully decorated domestic space, interspersed with dreamlike imagery. In one scene, a child’s paper mobile instils a nostalgic mood, while the sudden appearance of a fully grown horse in a bourgeois living room disturbs the tranquil atmosphere. The piece initiates a finely poised call-and-response between the two screens on which it is displayed, circling through images of slow-burning power and intensity. The result is an enchanting combination of the familiar and strange.

‘Connecting Thin Black Lines’ draws from a rich history of art-making and cultural activism rooted in the 1980s, a decade during which Himid curated two other landmark London shows of young Black and Asian women artists: ‘Five Black Women’ at the Africa Centre (1983) and ‘Black Woman Time Now’ at Battersea Arts Centre (1983–84). These groundbreaking exhibitions emerged in a context where activists like Olive Morris were organizing meetings with the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and Black and Asian women were campaigning against the ‘sus laws’, which allowed police officers to stop, search and arrest someone purely on the suspicion that the person intended to commit an arrestable offence – legislation that, in practice, gave the police free rein to harass Black men and women, whom they deemed predisposed to criminality.

Perhaps because it appears frozen in time, ‘Connecting Thin Black Lines’ falls somewhat flat, its conjuring of a bygone era limiting the exploration of contemporary – and more fractious – debates around gender and race. The importance of these artists is unquestionable, both in the strength of their work and in the urgent need to reorient how Black British art history is taught and understood. But I don’t feel entirely held under the exhibition’s sway. One issue may be the way many of the artists remain tethered to questions of identity and representation, a framework that gives the works a political edge but makes it hard for them to be read in other ways. There’s a moral seriousness to the exhibition that verges on heavy-handed. ‘Connecting Thin Black Lines’ is crucial for the way it places these artists in dialogue and reorganizes who matters in the narrative of Black British art history. But I find myself searching for more exhibitions that playfully tease apart our notions of identity, rather than adhere so faithfully to them. This is history’s curse: finding myself a little further ahead, I look back somewhat regretfully.

‘Connecting Thin Black Lines’ was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 24 June to 7 September

GAZELLE MBA

Gazelle Mba is a writer and editor. She works at the London Review of Books.