Scotland’s first Black professor, Sir Godfrey Palmer, described the Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation exhibition as “an acknowledgement that we are the same people from the past … who wouldn’t have [had] our portrait put up in this way”, in a recent BBC documentary.
Palmer is one of ten people featured in the Royal Collection Trust’s exhibition, which was commissioned by King Charles III to “recognise and celebrate the immeasurable difference that they [the Windrush generation], their children and their grandchildren have made to this country”. The exhibition is on at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
The timing of the exhibition is significant. It opened less than two weeks after the home secretary Suella Braverman’s declaration that multiculturalism in Britain had “failed”. Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation suggests that Britain’s multicultural project hasn’t failed at all. If anything, these portraits – and the people they depict – hold up a mirror to a society that has underappreciated the Windrush generation for far too long.
