Into the Open, subtitled "New Paintings, Prints and Sculptures by Contemporary Black Artists", was an exhibition of art by black artists displayed at various venues in the United Kingdom in 1984.
Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling(né Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling; born 26 February 1934), known as Frank Bowling, is a British artist who was born in British Guiana. He is particularly renowned for his large-scale, abstract "Map" paintings, which relate to abstract expressionism, colour field painting and lyrical abstraction. Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters", as "one of the most distinguished black artists to emerge from post-war British art schools" and as a "modern master". British cultural critic and theorist Stuart Hall situates Bowling’s career within a first generation, or “wave” of post-war, Black-British art, one characterised by postwar politics and British decolonisation. He is the first black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
The BLK Art Group was the name chosen in 1982 by a group of five influential conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in England. Keith Piper, Marlene Smith, Eddie Chambers and Donald Rodney were initially based in the Midlands.
George "Fowokan" Kelly is a Jamaican-born visual artist who lives in Britain and exhibits using the name "Fowokan". He is a largely self-taught artist, who has been practising sculpture since 1980. His work is full of the ambivalence he sees in the deep-rooted spiritual and mental conflict between the African and the European. Fowokan's work is rooted in the traditions of pre-colonial Africa and ancient Egypt rather than the Greco-Roman art of the west. He has also been a jeweller, essayist, poet and musician.
Ronald "Charlie" Phillips, also known by the nickname "Smokey", is a Jamaican-born restaurateur, photographer, and documenter of black London. He is now best known for his photographs of Notting Hill during the period of West Indian migration to London; however, his subject matter has also included film stars and student protests, with his photographs having appeared in Stern, Harper’s Bazaar, Life and Vogue and in Italian and Swiss journals. Notable recent shows by Phillips include How Great Thou Art, "a sensitive photographic documentary of the social and emotional traditions that surround death in London's African Caribbean community".
Winston Branch OBE is a British artist originally from Saint Lucia, the sovereign island in the Caribbean Sea. He still has a home there, while maintaining a studio in California. Works by Branch are included in the collections of Tate Britain, the Legion of Honor De Young Museum in San Francisco, California, and the St Louis Museum of Art in Missouri. Branch was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, the British Prix de Rome, a DAAD Fellowship to Berlin, a sponsorship to Belize from the Organization of American States, and was Artist in Residence at Fisk University in Tennessee. He has been a professor of fine arts and has taught at several art institutions in London and in the US. He has also worked as a theatrical set designer with various theatre groups.
Eddie Chambers is a British contemporary art historian, curator and artist. He currently holds the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Armet Francis is a Jamaican-born photographer and publisher who has lived in London since the 1950s. He has been documenting and chronicling the lives of people of the African diaspora for more than 40 years and his assignments have included work for The Times Magazine, The Sunday Times Supplement, BBC and Channel 4.
Claudette Elaine Johnson is a British visual artist. She is known for her large-scale drawings of Black women and her involvement with the BLK Art Group, of which she was a founder member. She was described by Modern Art Oxford as "one of the most accomplished figurative artists working in Britain today". A finalist for the Turner Prize in 2024, Johnson was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts the same year.
Errol Lloyd is a Jamaican-born artist, writer, art critic, editor and arts administrator. Since the 1960s he has been based in London, to which he originally travelled to study law. Now well known as a book illustrator, he was runner-up for the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1973 for his work on My Brother Sean by Petronella Breinburg.
No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990 was a major public art and archives exhibition, the first of its kind in the UK, held at the Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London, over a six-month period, with a future digital touring exhibition, and an associated programme of events. No Colour Bar took its impetus from the life work and archives of Jessica Huntley and Eric Huntley, Guyanese-born campaigners, political activists and publishers, who founded the publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications and the associated Walter Rodney Bookshop.
Denzil Forrester is a Grenada-born artist who moved to England as a child in 1967. Previously based in London, where he was a lecturer at Morley College, he moved to Truro, Cornwall, in 2016.
Uzo Egonu was a Nigerian-born artist who settled in Britain in the 1940s, only once returning to his homeland for two days in the 1970s, although he remained concerned with African political struggles. According to Rasheed Araeen, Egonu was "perhaps the first person from Africa, Asia or the Caribbean to come to Britain after the War with the sole intention of becoming an artist." According to critic Molara Wood, "Egonu's work merged European and Igbo traditions but more significantly, placed Africa as the touchstone of modernism. In combining the visual languages of Western and African art, he helped redefine the boundaries of modernism, thereby challenging the European myth of the naïve, primitive African artist."
Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede is a Nigerian poet, storyteller and artist, best known as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor.
Paul Dash is a Barbados-born artist, educator and writer who in 1957 migrated to Britain, where he was associated with the 1960s Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), taking part in their meetings and exhibitions. Describing the subject matter of his paintings, Dash has said: "The key themes in my work are street festivals and carnival (mas). It is partly in these popular art forms that African diasporic communities throughout the Americas and elsewhere maintain continuity with African traditions. My identity as an artist is fixed in the fun and spectacle, and ultimately the social and political resistance of mas." His pedagogical writing has been particularly concerned with multicultural and anti-racist art education.
Rita Keegan, is an American-born artist, lecturer and archivist, based in England since the late 1970s. She is a multi-media artist whose work uses video and digital technologies. Keegan is best known for her involvement with in the UK's Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and her work documenting artists of colour in Britain.
Victor Ehikhamenor is a Nigerian visual artist, writer, and photographer known for his expansive works that engage with multinational cultural heritage and postcolonial socioeconomics of contemporary black lives. In 2017, he was selected to represent Nigeria at the Venice Biennale, the first time Nigeria would be represented in the event. His work has been described as representing "a symbol of resistance" to colonialism.
Brenda Patricia Agard was a Black-British photographer, artist, poet and storyteller who was most active in the 1980s, when she participated in some of the first art exhibitions organized by Black-British artists in the United Kingdom. Agard's work focused on creating "affirming images centred on the resilience of the Black woman," according to art historian Eddie Chambers.
Joseph Adekunle Olubo, was an artist and book illustrator active in the 1980s. He participated in some of the first art exhibitions organized by Black British artists in the United Kingdom. Olubo was one of 22 artists included in the 1983 inaugural exhibition, Heart in Exile, at The Black-Art Gallery, an art space in London which worked with artists of African and Caribbean backgrounds.
Amanda Bintu Holiday is a Sierra Leonean-British artist, filmmaker and poet.
