‘The Time is Always Now': Black artists shine at London's National Portrait Gallery's latest show

euronews (in English)

Paintings, drawing and sculptures created by Black artists come together at London's National Portrait Gallery as part of a major exploration into the portrayal of the Black figure in contemporary art.

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:10 We're in a period right now where black artists are working at a level of

00:24 extraordinary proficiency and I've been celebrated and recognized

00:29 internationally at a level we've never seen in history before.

00:33 So the show is partly about marking this moment but it's also about

00:37 looking further than this. It's also about

00:40 looking through the eyes of the artists and the subjects in their work. It's also

00:46 an invitation into inquiry, an invitation into

00:51 what does black experience, black lived experience, black identity and being and

00:58 presence and history, what does this look like?

01:03 I've got two paintings here on display at the National Portrait Gallery today.

01:09 One of them is called Harriet Tubman en route to Canada and the other one is

01:13 called Nanny of the Maroons' Fifth Act of Mercy

01:17 and essentially they're sort of portrayals of two historic

01:22 black women, one from the Nanny of the Maroons from the 18th century Jamaica

01:28 and Harriet Tubman from 19th century America and both of them were sort of

01:33 activists, actually military commanders in the struggle against

01:37 slavery.

01:39 One could say that particularly since the

01:44 the murder of George Floyd and you know the widespread protests which took place

01:50 in the Black Lives Matter context, definitely the questions of race and

01:53 representation have sort of moved higher up the agenda of media and

01:57 culture but I think that we're still at the

02:02 the very earliest stages.

02:06 [Music]

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