Rediscovering Black Portraiture

Fascinating online lecture from the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at Peter Brathwaite’s lockdown project recreating portraits of black figures.

Brathwaite is an opera singer who in lockdown took up the Getty Challenge to recreate portraits using objects around the house. He decided to look at black figures and produced an image a day for 50 days which he has now published in a book “A Story in Three Acts”. I had seen some of their works in a street exhibition on King’s College so was intrigued to hear him talking about them and to see more.

He was interviewed by Jenny Gaschke, the coordinator of a display at the museum at the moment called “Between Two Worlds” for which he has produced the image shown here. He explained how making the images led him to research not only the people shown but also his own family history.  He talked about the bias in archives, not only in their content but also in the racist language to search them because of when they were created and catalogued.

  

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