Exhibition review: Black Atlantic: power, people, resistance

A content warning states at several points throughout the exhibition: 'This exhibition explores themes of enslavement and racism.It includes depictions of slavery and objects linked to violence and exploitation'. 1 This review does as well.The Fitzwilliam Museum has skillfully delivered its most important exhibition to date: Black Atlantic: power, people, resistance (hereafter Black Atlantic).It is a triumph of curatorial collaboration and expert research, carefully crafted into a narrative that disrupts our historical understanding of Richard Fitzwilliam, the founding of the Museum, and our perceptions of European visual culture in the complicity of perpetuating and justifying the transatlantic enslavement of African peoples.The name draws on Robert Farris Thompson 2 and Paul Gilroy's 3 respective writings on Black visual culture and the Atlantic's 'rich conceptual space for limitless imagination, transmission and exchange' 4 that grew as a result of the violent 400 years of Europe's barbaric mission to forcefully transport more than twelve million Africans across the ocean.Stretching over the first three rooms of the Museum's top floor, the exhibition is the first that visitors are inclined to peruse when coming through the grand staircase entrance, though it's less obvious to guests requiring the lift found at the main entrance at the opposite end.At that end it does, however, have fair directions to Black Atlantic and signage explaining the tarnished origins of Richard Fitzwilliam's bequest sum of 100,000 that allowed the museum to open.