25-06-2025
Connecting Thin Black Lines review — the invisible women of British art
The Thin Black Line, at the ICA in 1985, was a modest landmark. Curated by the artist Lubaina Himid (who was appointed OBE in 2010 and won the Turner prize in 2017), the exhibition focused on a group of black and Asian British female artists and represented a challenge to their collective invisibility in the art world. As Himid described them, 'eleven of the hundreds of creative black women in Britain', barely acknowledged by the artistic establishment.
This new ICA show, again curated by Himid, brings together works made by those same 11 women in the intervening decades, highlighting their connections — the photographers Ingrid Pollard and Brenda Agardappear in Claudette Johnson's imposing painted triptych, for example — and indicating the accuracy of Himid's remark in 1985, 'We are here to stay.'
Several of the artists have risen to prominence in recent years. Sonia Boyce represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2022; in the same year Himid was the subject of a big exhibition at Tate Modern and Veronica Ryan won the Turner prize. Johnson was the only painter nominated for it last year; Chila Kumari Burman, whose exuberant neons stealthily explore stereotypes and perspectives of Britishness, has a new large-scale commission at the Imperial War Museum North until the end of August. This ought to feel like a triumph, a victory lap. So why doesn't it?
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Partly because this show is not big enough. It's true that, taking the main gallery on the ICA's ground floor, it's an improvement on the original 1985 show. That occupied only the corridor (euphemistically described as the 'concourse') that leads from the entrance on The Mall to the bar — much to the chagrin of the artists, who quite reasonably felt they were still being marginalised; the title of the show was a wry nod to this.
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But having seen shows extended into the airy galleries upstairs on Carlton House Terrace, it was still a bit disappointing to find this occupying so bijou a space. I didn't know the work of Jennifer Comrie, whose striking pastel and collage drawings are weird and compelling, and would have liked to see more of it. There's just one sculpture by Ryan, a bit tantalising, a bit lost.
Sulter's Zabat series, of nine photographic portraits of black women as muses of the arts from Greek mythology, have power individually, but a bigger selection — there's just one Polyhymnia (Portrait of Dr Ysaye Barnwell) — would be even more impactful.
Here we all are, it says, still making work, still complex and exciting, still almost none of us recognised names outside the art world — a frustration acknowledged by Himid in the accompanying guide. But it doesn't have room to say much more than that, to expand our knowledge of these artists beyond reminding us they exist. How much has changed, really? ★★★☆☆ICA, London, Jun 24 to Sep 7,
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