There is a crackly tape recording of Claudette Johnson addressing Britain’s first ever Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982. It is one of those stray recovered moments in the national conversation that passing time has made electric. Johnson was 22, and her voice on the recording is tentative but spirited as she goes through slides of the new paintings she has been making as a student at the city’s polytechnic – mostly big, bold canvases of Black women – and sets them beside more familiar images from the canon of western art: Paul Gauguin’s “exotic” South Sea islanders, say, or Édouard Manet’s Olympia, in which a Black servant almost disappears into the shadows beside the spotlit white nude in the foreground.
On the tape, Johnson’s small voice makes a determined case for the idea that what she was doing in her second-year fine art course in the Midlands had never been done before, at least in Britain. “Black women have been presented as people who did not have anything to offer in themselves but were just there to be looked at,” she says. “I have tried in my own images to be very personal, and to talk from my own experience and nothing else, so I can be sure it’s honest and explore a side of Black women that isn’t often seen.”
