The Significance of Magazine Publishing for Black British Art since 1950

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The aim of the research is to analyse visual arts magazines produced in the UK between 1960 and 2000 which specificallyattend to the work of Black artists and for which the editorial and publishing process was controlled primarily by people ofcolour. By taking the periodicals as the object of study in their own right, I aim to critically examine the role of independentpublishing as fostering new debates, positions and understandings of how visual arts intersect with issues of race, class,gender, sexuality and the legacies of colonialism. I will argue that these magazines were co-constitutive with a successionof Black British art movements, in several cases providing the conditions for artistic practices to emerge. By reading theartworks and magazines together, we can gain a richer understanding of the broader ecology of Black British culturalproduction. In the current context of renewed engagement with decolonisation and re-examining previously marginalisedhistories, this research has significant cultural urgency.To understand the changing historiography of Black British art, I will produce a documents-based analysis, which isattentive to properties of magazines such as their seriality, multiple authorship, design, para-textual features and theirdialogic relationship with audiences. By contextualising the magazines within varied print cultures including artists'publications, Black radical publishing and the mainstream art press, I will evaluate their importance in remapping and'reworlding' British art history. The magazines are also of great social, cultural and political importance, for exampleproviding unique documentation of the first Black British collective of writers and artists or one of the earliestautobiographical accounts of British Muslim lesbian identity. The research will illuminate larger cultural struggles over thepolitics of representation and the explore the extent to which print media provide a key site of contestation.