John Singleton Copley RA, Watson and the Shark

Talk

Art, colonialism and change: symposium

Friday 26 April 2024 10am - 6pm

The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre | Burlington Gardens

Symposium

£45/£15. Includes early-morning access to the RA’s exhibition Entangled Pasts, 1768 - now: Art Colonialism and Change from 8.30am, light refreshments and a drinks reception.

Sold out

Friends of the RA book first

Join now

Entangled Pasts, 1768–now

Go to the exhibition

Made possible by the Armando Garza-Sada Sr. Endowment for the Arts

Explore themes of empire, enslavement and resistance through the lens of artworks presented in our exhibition ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change’.

This academic symposium will present current research, on artworks from our colonial pasts and on the artists working today in dialogue with these works. Using artworks in the exhibition Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change, speakers will investigate themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.

Sessions will consider:
• Dialogues between artist and audience
• The changing reception of an artwork over time
• Interpretations of the artists’ perspective
• Importance of historical research and the archive
• Form, monument and sculpture
• Genre and media, from history painting to video art
• Inclusion and exclusion
• Ideas of ownership

Speakers include Professor Grace Aneiza Ali, Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Dr. Mia L. Bagneris, Dr. Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Dr. Nika Elder, Dr. Zehra Jumabhoy, Professor Erica Moiah James, Dr. Elizabeth Robles and Dr. Mathura Umachandran.

We will also hear from exhibiting artists Olu Ogunnaike and Shahzia Sikander on how these themes inform their practice.

The event will be accompanied by speech-to-text transcription courtesy of Stagetext.

£45/£15. Includes early-morning access to the RA’s exhibition Entangled Pasts, 1768 - now: Art Colonialism and Change from 8.30am, light refreshments and a drinks reception.

Sold out

Friends of the RA book first

Join now

Entangled Pasts, 1768–now

Go to the exhibition

Made possible by the Armando Garza-Sada Sr. Endowment for the Arts

Programme

Session 1: Economics of Empire

Chair: Rebecca Lyons, Royal Academy of Arts

Risky Business: John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark and the Atlantic Slave Trade Dr. Nika Elder, American University, D.C.

Trading Places: Unpicking Asia and Empire Dr. Zehra Jumabhoy, University of Bristol

Threads of Empire: Colonial Commodities and Material Inheritances Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University

Artist in-conversation: Shahzia Sikander in conversation with Professor Dorothy Price

Session 2: Materiality: Beauty and Difference

Chair: Sarah Lea, Royal Academy of Arts

Materialising Black Beauty or Manifesting Misogynoir?: The Paradox of Black Feminine Beauty in the Sculpture of John Bell Dr. Mia L. Bagneris, Tulane University

The Public Archive of Black History and the Black Present Dr. Clive Chijioke Nwonka, University College London

Plinth as Mis-monument: refusal and retort Dr. Mathura Umachandran, University of Exeter

Session 3: Colonial legacies

Chair: Professor Dorothy Price, The Courtauld

Weaving Art Histories Dr. Elizabeth Robles, University of Bristol

Migration’s Entanglements in Frank Bowling’s Middle Passage Paintings Professor Grace Aneiza Ali, Florida State University

Contemporary Art as Catalysis for the Reimagination of History in Our Present Professor Erica Moiah James, University of Miami

Artist in-conversation: Olu Ogunnaike

Speakers

Session 1: Economics of Empire

Dr. Nika Elder is Associate Professor of Art History at American University. She specializes in the art of the United States with a particular interest in the mutually constitutive relationship between art and race throughout modern American history. Her first book, William Harnett’s Curious Objects: Still-Life Painting after the American Civil War (University of California Press, 2022) recuperates the politics of painting in the Gilded Age. She has also published essays on contemporary art in Art Journal and the Routledge Companion to African American Art. Nika is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled John Singleton Copley’s Taste for Flesh: Anglo-American Painting and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Related research articles on Copley appear in Art History and Winterthur Portfolio. Her research has been supported by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Wyeth Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Title: John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark and the Atlantic Slave Trade

Dr. Zehra Jumabhoy is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol, UK. She was the Steven and Elena Heinz Scholar at The Courtauld, where she completed her PhD and was an Associate Lecturer. Guest Curator for the US travelling show, Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West, currently at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, she is also the Paul Mellon Curatorial Research Fellow at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, where she is co-curating the exhibition, Tigers and Dragons: Conversations between India and Wales in 2025.

Title: Trading Places: Unpicking Asia and Empire

Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate Professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Anna focuses on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, but has also written about Australian and South Asian visual culture Her research centers the visual histories of race, empire, medicine, and migration. Her first book is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). Other projects include a co-written book with Prof Mia Bagneris on 19th century Black Diaspora artists, and a monograph on the intersection of art and medicine in plantation imagery. She is Senior Research Fellow of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and director of Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism www.artandcolonialmedicine.com. A list of further publications can be found at www.annaarabindankesson.com.

Title: Threads of Empire: Colonial Commodities and Material Inheritances

Chair: Rebecca Lyons

Artist In-Conversation: Shahzia Sikander with Professor Dorothy Price

Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary international art practices and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Interrogating ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through feminist perspectives, Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender, sexuality, racial narratives, and colonial histories. Sikander is a recipient of the MacArthur award and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation's Pollock Prize for Creativity, among others.

Chair: Dr. Dorothy Price is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of numerous books and articles on modern and contemporary art and also works as a curator. Her exhibitions have included Personal Feeling is the Main Thing with Chantal Joffe at The Lowry, Salford in 2018, For Esme with Love and Squalor also with Chantal Joffe at Arnolfini, Bristol in 2020, Making Modernism at The Royal Academy of Arts in 2023, Claudette Johnson Presence at The Courtauld Gallery in 2023 and the Royal Academy's main galleries exhibition for Spring 2024, Entangled Pasts 1768-now: Art, colonialism and change. Dorothy is currently preparing two new books, one called The Courage to Look and the other, For Opacity: A Visual Poetics of Black British Art.

Session 2: Materiality: Beauty and Difference

Dr. Mia L. Bagneris is an Associate Professor of art history and Africana studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Tulane University. She is the author of Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the Art of Agostino Brunias (2018, Manchester University Press), and her presentation for Entangled Pasts features research from her current project, Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Art & Culture, c1865-1900. Dr. Bagneris’s scholarly activities have been supported by numerous institutions including the Yale Center for British Art, Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Title: Materialising Black Beauty or Manifesting Misogynoir?: The Paradox of Black Feminine Beauty in the Sculpture of John Bell

Dr. Clive Chijioke Nwonka is Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society at UCL, and a Faculty Associate of the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Nwonka is the co-editor of the book Black Film/British Cinema II (2021) and is the author of the book Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film (2023).

Title: The Public Archive of Black History and the Black Present

Dr. Mathura Umachandran (she/they) is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. They hold a BA in Classics from University of Oxford (2009), an MA in Reception of the Ancient World from UCL (2011) and a PhD in Classics from Princeton University (2018). Since 2020 they have co-stewarded a research collective with Marchella Ward (Open University) Critical Ancient World Studies (Routledge 2024a project) called) that rewires ancient-ness through a decolonial lens. They have published articles, reviews, and essays in a range of academic venues, including Classical Receptions Journal, American Journal of Philology, New German Critique, Transactions of the American Philological Association, Ramus. They theorised a notion of subversive collective memory in American Historical Review’s September 2023 issue, in an essay contribution to the History Lab on ‘Engaged History’ titled ‘Mismonumentality: Remembering Empire with Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus’.

Title: Plinth as Mis-monument: refusal and retort

Chair: Sarah Lea is an art historian and curator trained at Goldsmiths College and Birkbeck, University of London. Having joined the Royal Academy of Arts in 2007, she has curated major exhibitions including most recently Francis Bacon: Man and Beast (2022) and Making Modernism: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin (2022-23).

Session 3: Colonial Legacies

Dr. Elizabeth Robles is Lecturer in Contemporary Art and the Director of the Centre for Black Humanities at the University of Bristol. She is also the co-lead of the British Art Network’s Black British Artists Research Group. Previously she held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for a project entitled ‘Making Waves: Black Artists & ‘Black Art’ in Britain from 1962–1982’. She is a specialist in the histories of Black and brown artists in Britain since the 1960s and is particularly interested in the formation of ideas around ‘b/Black a/Art’ across the twentieth century.

Title: Weaving Art Histories

Guyanese-born Grace Aneiza Ali is a curator and assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Florida State University and is a 2024-25 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at The Huntington. As a curator-scholar of contemporary art of the Global South, her curatorial research practice examines the conceptual links and slippages at the nexus of art and migration. Ali specialises in art of the Caribbean Diaspora with particular attention to her homeland Guyana. Her book, Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora explores the art and migration narratives of women of Guyanese heritage. Ali is Editor-in-Chief of the College Art Associations’ Art Journal Open and member of the Board of Advisors for British Art Studies.

Title: Migration’s Entanglements in Frank Bowling’s Middle Passage Paintings

Professor Erica Moiah James is an art historian and curator teaching in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Miami. Before arriving in Miami, she was the founding director and chief curator of the National Gallery of The Bahamas and an Assistant Professor of Art History and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research centers on indigenous, modern, and contemporary art of the Caribbean, Americas, and the African Diaspora. More recent publications include Decolonizing Time: Nineteenth Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art (2019); “A Gust of Grace: Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas,” (2022); “Outta’ Line”: Decolonial Enlightenment and the Genre of History Painting in Contemporary Caribbean Art,” (2023); “La Luz de Cosas/’The Light of Things”(2023) on the work of Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso and the chapter “Prismatic Blackness: Art, Being and Aesthetics in the Global Caribbean” (2024). Her forthcoming book is entitled After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary with Duke University Press.

Title: Contemporary Art as Catalysis for the Reimagination of History in Our Present

Chair: Professor Dorothy Price

Artist In-Conversation: Olu Ogunnaike

Olu Ogunnaike is an artist based in London. Taking trees as repositories of memory within the places and communities in which they grow, Ogunnaike cites wood as a marker of possible encounters: between past and present; between people and the spaces we inhabit. Ogunnaike is interested in the parallels that can be drawn between humans and trees, tracing the moment a tree is uprooted from one geographical setting and placed in another, where it might be transformed. This story – of the composite and accumulative nature of our identities – is inextricably linked to community, labour and the transaction of exchange. Recent solo exhibitions include, Fix your face, Spike Island, Bristol UK (2024); An enclosed garden, gb agency, Paris FR (2022); I’d rather stand, Museum Folkwang, Essen, DE (2021); Crumbs, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, FR (2021); London Plain, Cell Project Space, London, UK (2020). Group exhibitions include, Your presence is a present, Hessell museum, New York, US (2024); Systemic Love, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, FR (2023); To “the fire next time”, Villa Arson, Nice, FR (2023); Testament, Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2022); Domestic Drama, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Graz, AT (2021); Reconfigured, Timothy Taylor, New York, US (2021).