Art, Colonialism and Change: Entangled Pasts at The Royal Academy
Interrogating its own history, we visit the Royal Academy's latest exhibition...
By
Susan Gray
February 3, 2024
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
The merging of past and present in Entangled Pasts begins before visitors enter the gallery. In the Royal Academy’s neo-classical courtyard, Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper (Galaxy Black) presents supersized, historic figures from the African diaspora. Striking in black and gold, the sculptural characters, including the artist, Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey and Derek Walcott, sit in animated conversation around a timeless table, setting the tone for what is to come. Curator Dorothy Price explains that the origins for the show lay in the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and the Rijksmuseum and Slavery exhibition which closed in February last year, and presented a curatorial model for openly examining art’s institutional conscience.
Taking the Royal Academy’s foundation in 1768 as its departure point, Entangled Pasts looks at how the institution was shaped by its foundation during the zenith of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved people, but also its response to the resistance and abolition movements of the time. As a training ground for the artists who went out to the British Empire and worked for the East India Company, RA graduates reflected the Empire back to Britain, but also disseminated Britain’s values and tastes to the Empire.
Inevitably, Entangled Pasts operates with a tension between being unable to replicate the trauma of slavery, but also not seeking to whitewash it. Contemporary Royal Academicians including Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien have been addressing these issues for decades, and their works, interleaved between the sculptures and paintings of historic RA alumni, offer opportunities for fresh interrogation, new reading and reframing. Locke’s installation Armada (2017-19) takes centre stage in a gallery devoted to history paintings – the depiction of scenes from the Bible, mythology or history – was ranked first in the hierarchy of artistic genres promoted by the RA in the eighteenth century. Through the rigging, sails and masts of Locke’s flotilla of representations of the Mayflower and the Windrush (1948), together with cargo and fishing boats, it is possible to view emotionally charged and idealised historic scenes from another age.
John Singer Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is one of the stand-out pieces of the show for a whole host of reasons; Copley depicts the rescue of a young merchant seaman and future Lord Mayor of London, Brook Watson, from a shark attack in Havana harbour, an event that took place almost thirty years earlier. The painting was exhibited at the RA in the year it was created and, as a large-scale heroic painting on a contemporary subject infused with Atlantic politics, it caused a sensation. On the dialogue between Armada and Watson and the Shark across the centuries Locke notes that: ‘It’s very interesting that Armada is hung near the Copley painting, Watson and the Shark, which shows people in peril on the sea, with ships of the time in the background. Some of those kinds of ships are replicated in Armada, but the installation includes other ships from across a whole swathe of history, because Armada is about the past and the present meeting. It references migration, then and now, and references empire and slavery, of course. … And in the show, the boats will tie together with the images and histories on the walls around the work.’
Having sailed the Atlantic to tour Europe in 1774, the success of Watson and the Shark cemented Copley’s reputation, and the Massachusetts-born artist was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Copley is the only known Academician to have owned enslaved people, although many others, including those who supported abolition, worked for patrons whose fortunes were derived from enslavement and plantation ownership. Watson and the Shark crossed the Atlantic to Boston in the nineteenth century, but its popularity as a print went on to influence generations of European painters. Copley’s triangular composition of figures in a boat, with an African American seaman at the centre, prefigures Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and it is possible that the French Romantic saw a print of the earlier work.
For everybody whose mothers and grandmothers left homes and families behind to give their children a better life in a different country, Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023) will resonate deeply. The life-sized fibreglass mannequin, dressed in a vibrant red and blue Dutch wax printed cotton textile, ascends an ornate staircase carrying a bursting Gladstone bag, but also visible hope for a new life. The globe in place of her head underlines the universality and humanity of her journey. Entangled Pasts finishes with Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a joyful mixed media installation of colourful figures striding towards the future, as a soundtrack narrates their resilience, creativity and community in the face of adversity and cruelty.
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change is showing at The Royal Academy of Arts until 28th April 2024.
