Stance Takes: Reframing The Black Image - Pioneers of The Past w/ Alayo Akinkugbe; Renata Cherlise; Theo Imani & Osei Bonsu

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Made in Partnership with Vibe Called Tech for The North Face and Gucci collaboration, Pioneers of the Past is a celebration of four talents who are remapping and rethinking how the Black image is presented in fine and contemporary art. In this special programme to celebrate Stance’s 4th Birthday, we talk to four curators and visual researchers who are defining new ways of looking and seeing the Black image in visual arts.

*To Douse the Devil for a Ducat, 2015, oil on canvas Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London*

Frustrated with the lack of representation on her degree course, Cambridge University student Alayo Akinkugbe started the Instagram account A Black History of Art early last year. Her platform highlights the overlooked Black artists, sitters, curators and thinkers in Art History.

Renata Cherlise has been building an extraordinary archive of Black images at BlackArchives.co, redefining who chooses the images preserved and celebrated. Through her work, she builds places where the Black image lives for itself rather than in some kind of abstraction of whiteness.

Theo Imani is an Italian Ghanaian medical student and visual researcher with a passion for finding echoes between the African and European image. His Instagram account @theoimani seeks to interrogate the relationship between imagery, teasing the classical and the contemporary to reframe notions of the Black image.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby's mural Remain, Thriving (Art on the Underground series TFL x Brixton)

Osei Bonsu, International Curator at Tate Modern is an expert in Black, African and diasporic art. His work as an independent curator in Paris and London seeks to challenge institutions and artists to fully represent the range and nuances of black art, pushing the art world to expand their understanding and appreciation.

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