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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Lanre Bakare Arts and culture correspondent

UK galleries rushed to diversify art after Black Lives Matter, artist says

A painting of two men looking away from a landscape behind them
Homesickness a Blindman's Paradise by Gavin Jantjes, who was exiled from South Africa for creating works that were viewed as critical of the apartheid regime. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Sotheby's

British arts institutions deployed “kneejerk” and “stopgap” responses in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement as they attempted to avoid criticism for the lack of diversity in their collections, according to the artist Gavin Jantjes.

The South Africa-born artist, who was a key figure during the British black art movement of the 1980s, told the Guardian that under-pressure organisations approached him to buy work that they had ignored since it was made decades earlier.

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