Intimacies of Art and Empire

Entangled Pasts, 1768 –Now: Art, Colonialism, and Change presented more than one hundred artworks at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England. On view from February to the end of April in 2024, the show reckoned with the role of art in empire-building, colonialism, enslavement, resistance, abolition, and indenture, focusing on the connections between art associated with the Royal Academy and Britain’s colonial histories.Renowned works by artists such as J. M. W Turner (1775–1851) and contemporary art by the Singh Twins (Amrit Singh and Rabindra Kaur Singh; 1966) were in conversation with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works by artists such as Johann Zoffany (1733–1810), best known for his “conversation pieces,” and Thomas Stothard (1755–1834), whose romanticized depiction of the Middle Passage in the etching Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies appeared in the third edition of Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1801), conveying the coeval economies of slavery and art.Margaret Burroughs’s Black Venus (1957) eschews Stothard’s exploitation to represent the goddess of love as an African woman, while Kara Walker’s studies for Fons Americanus (2019) expand the threads of history that led to the infamous thirteen-meter fountain sculpture that allegorizes the Black Atlantic. Among these conversations, it was surprising not to find a reference to Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” which examines “the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery.”1Entangled Pasts drew together the “intimacies of four continents,” a phrase coined by Lisa Lowe, whose eponymous book maps a genealogy of liberalism to make visible the ways in which the exploitative economies of indenture and slavery made possible bourgeois life in European and North American countries.2 The wall texts disclosed these contexts with a reassuring frankness: “The decades surrounding the R[oyal A[cademy]’s foundation in 1768 saw the official establishment of British rule in India, and the height of Britain’s Atlantic trade in enslaved African people. . . . These artworks can represent only a fraction of the institution’s colonial links and the unfolding legacies of British colonialism around the world.”Hew Locke’s Armada (2017–19) is a hanging installation of miniature boats modeled on historical maritime vessels such as the Mayflower (1960), HMT Empire Windrush (1948), and ships belonging to the East India Company as well as fishing boats and cargo ships. The ships are richly detailed with overhanging vines, moss, plastic bags, and good-luck tokens. Some are shocking, such as a raft that looks to be made of wood and scraps, recalling the refugee crises across the world, particularly in the Mediterranean. Introducing his flotilla in a post for social media, Locke views the boats as a “collection of histories” and “ghosts of the past, floating alongside the realities of the present.”3 Speaking to Colby College in Maine, Locke expands on the work’s spectral influences, referencing a well-known American film: “Apocalypse Now features quite strongly in the imagery” for Armada.4 Just as Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film adapts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), transposing the Vietnam War in the film over the setting and contexts of late nineteenth-century Congo in the novella, Locke activates several pasts through these vessels, whose suspension in the gallery casts thick shadows on the floors, emphasizing enduring histories.John Akomfrah’s The Vertigo Sea: Oblique Tales from the Aquatic Sublime (2015) draws stark and arresting connections between the contexts of the Black Atlantic, the Black Mediterranean, and other hazardous waters. The three-screen film about the sea “juxtaposes archival footage with staged scenes of shipwrecks and narrative snippets drawn from Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf. Shot in northern Norway, the Faroe Islands, and the Isle of Skye, Akomfrah interrogates the histories and afterlives of migration and slavery. Polar bears are shot, whales are hunted and cut open, migrants are dragged from the water, Black bodies lie face-down on the shore.”5Vertigo Sea boasts the profound poetic clarity characteristic of Akomfrah’s oeuvre. He accomplishes the impossible task of presenting echoes, patterns, and cycles throughout history, in different times and places, to visualize the legacies of colonization and imperialism without the didactic linearity of cause and effect.The first room of the Royal Academy set a tone of reverence. I returned to this gallery of portraits of Black sitters after circling through Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004), a colorful and deceptively optimistic series of sculptures featuring life-size cutouts of people that story the figure of the “slave/servant but also the émigré and the asylum seeker.”6As in Himid’s installation, Black and racialized people were front and center in the first room. The wall text noted that the portraits in the central hall were those of Black sitters, “many living in Georgian Britain as a result of the vast complex of marine transport that enabled the plantation economy.” In a painting dated 1740–80, featuring a distinguished Black man in a red coat, both the painter and the sitter are unknown, but speculative suggestions for the sitter include abolitionists Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho.Portrait of a Man, Probably Francis Barber (ca. 1770), painted by Joshua Reynolds (1723–92; a founder of the RA and its first president), represents a Black man whose gleaming eyes are directed to the skies, evoking a keen sense of observation and wit. The wall text notes that Barber was born enslaved on a sugar plantation in Jamaica and arrived in England at the age of fifteen with his enslaver, Colonel Richard Bathurst. He became a free man in 1775 when Bathurst died, and “Barber became the servant, companion and heir to Reynolds’ friend the writer Samuel Johnson, known for his English dictionary.”Kerry James Marshall’s Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776, 2007 is a clarion of generosity and Black sovereignty. In acrylics, Marshall paints Moorhead, who was an enslaved artist working in Boston in the late eighteenth century. None of Moorhead’s works survive, but he is known because of a dedication to him in a poem by Phyllis Wheatley.7 The stark contrast of Marshall’s colors and its layers of influence and acknowledgment gesture to the lasting impacts of Black and racialized art that resound from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the show’s historical legacies to the “now” beyond the show’s title. The RA presented a necessary reckoning with accountability and violent institutional histories to convey the complex labors and journeys of art in Entangled Pasts.