Since the 1980’s, the work of black british artists has risen to prominence. Artists such as Frank Bowling and Sonia Boyce are displayed in the collections of some of the World’s best known museums including the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Despite this, there was for many years a struggle to include the work of black artists in the common national heritage, and for artists whose origins lie outside of the UK to be recognised for the influence they have had on art practices in Britain.
Throughout the 1980s local art historian Eddie Chambers was an active champion of the visual arts practices of artists from African/ African-Caribbean/ South Asian and other diasporas. He accumulated both a detailed knowledge and archival collection along the way. Those significant materials have buried his Bristol-based flat ever since, and have remained largely hidden away from public eyes: until recently. Eddie’s collection attracted the attention of Watershed, a centre for innovation, talent and creativity in Bristol whose aim is to make local arts accessible to its community.
With funding from the AHRC Professor Jonathan Dovey, of the Faculty of
the Arts at the University of West England, Eddie Chambers and researcher Karen Di Franco have been able to transfer this valuable information into the public domain. From this collaboration the Diaspora Art project was born. With its overlapping history, re-evaluation of british art history and the integral role of diasporic art cultures, this project has a lot to contribute to how our artistic heritage is viewed today.
The project resulted in www.diaspora-artists.net , a phenomenally detailed resource that charts the progress of modern black artistic representation from the 1980s right up to the present day. It is one of the most comprehensive online archives of visual work in the country, made up of individual journal archives, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, manuscripts, exhibition catalogues and invitations and other contextual documents. The website is as rich and varied as the collection and diasporas it represents, and it constantly moves and evolves before its user and offers new avenues of research.
Professor Jonathan Dovey explains “The intention is to utilize and transfer this knowledge into an engaging and informative online resource that explores and presents the history of these artists [...] in a range of ways that demonstrates the vitality and necessity of black artists’ practice, as an integral component of the wider British art scene.”
Researchers, curators, art professionals, new media specialists and other relevant bodies were all involved in Diaspora Artists, and could all learn from each other’s expertise. Project member Karen Di Franco has taken Eddie’s specialist knowledge and put it into the public arena learning new skills in the process. The archive’s change of form, from Eddie’s personal collection to a more formal documentation, shows how knowledge has been transferred to the public domain. In Professor Dovey’s words “Knowledge transfer is the process of all parties working together: it is ‘vital’.”
Image: Yinka Shonibare, MBE. J Odile and Odette, Invite relating to an exhibition, 2008. www.diaspora-artists.net