Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History, review: an affecting look at the post-Windrush artists that were ridiculed and ignored

Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History (BBC Four) was a revelatory survey of the black and Asian artists whose work is largely obscured in British art history. It began with a series of startling archive interviews with young artists in the Eighties. “I was told by my lecturers that there was no such thing as black art,” one of them said. They included last year’s Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid, now 64, who arrived in Britain from Zanzibar as a child.

The documentary was driven by the remarkable efforts of Afro-Caribbean British artist Sonia Boyce, who has been searching museum and gallery collections for works hidden in the archives and rarely displayed. She had discovered 2,000 works, including exciting and thought-provoking abstract pieces, figurative paintings and political art.

The struggle for recognition of the artists who arrived from Commonwealth countries in the years after the Windrush docked in 1948, and the generations that followed, was encapsulated in one very affecting sequence. The first large-scale exhibition of work from artists of ethnic backgrounds was held at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. It was called The Other Story, and it had been put together by the artist Rasheed Araeen, who arrived from Pakistan in 1964.

It was a watershed moment, yet the reviews had not only been sneering, but included personal attacks on its curator. We saw how, at the time, one newspaper quoted a visitor who had said, “It’s nice kids’ stuff”, and labelled Araeen a “prankster”.

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