The National Portrait Gallery is tracing the Black figure throughout portraiture with its spring exhibition, ‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’, with curator Ekow Eshun uniting works from 22 African diasporic artists working in the UK and US.
In the first part of the exhibition, they consider identity and representation through the lens of African American sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ 1903 theory, Double Consciousness, exploring the juxtaposition between how artists see themselves and how they are seen. Elsewhere, artists respond to the absence of the Black figure in historical archives, and address representations of Black gatherings.
