The BLK Art Group: Art, Politics and the West Midlands

Young artists making their own opportunities

The BLK Art Group grew from an association of young Black artists in and around Wolverhampton. Its origins lay in 1979, and its most concentrated collective activity occupied the early 1980s. Painting, sculpture, collage and installation became ways to examine the society in which its members were growing up. They also organised exhibitions and conversations through which other artists could meet. Their activities helped shape the wider British Black Arts Movement, while retaining the disagreements and changing relationships of a small group. ¹

The history matters partly because these artists were so young. Some were still students, learning techniques and deciding what kind of work they wanted to make. Organising became part of that education. An exhibition required a room, publicity, works to show and people willing to see them. A convention required speakers and an audience prepared to argue. Through such practical acts, the group helped turn individual experiences of exclusion into a public discussion about British art.

Starting in the West Midlands

Keith Piper’s account places a crucial encounter at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, where he met Eddie Chambers on the foundation course in 1979. Both had grown up in Caribbean families in the West Midlands. Chambers was already gathering artist friends from Wolverhampton, supported by the local activist Eric Pemberton. Piper joined a developing network rather than an organisation with a settled constitution. Its early name, Wolverhampton Young Black Artists, located its ambitions in a particular place and generation. ²

The members’ education soon spread that network. Chambers studied in Sunderland, while Piper went to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham. Donald Rodney subsequently studied at Trent and became involved through Piper. The movement between home, college and exhibition venue helped the group reach beyond one town. It also complicates a London-centred account of Black British culture: relationships formed in the Midlands could connect artists working across the country. The region was a starting point for those connections, not a limit on their ambitions. ²

Learning what art education left out

In a later interview, Chambers described how little information about Black artists in Britain had been available during his art-school education. He connected that absence with his subsequent work as an organiser, critic and historian. Artists had to find predecessors and contemporaries for themselves, then help make their work visible. This was an additional demand alongside making pictures or completing a course. An incomplete account of art history could leave a student without a convincing sense of where their own practice belonged. ³

Chambers also recalled meeting Frank Bowling at the 1982 Black Art Convention. Bowling’s commitment to abstraction differed from the explicit social narratives favoured by many younger artists. That encounter exposed a productive difficulty: supporting Black artists did not settle what their art should look like. An established painter and a young activist could share an interest in challenging exclusion while disagreeing about the relationship between images, political messages and artistic freedom. Such differences were part of the movement’s intellectual life. ³

Black Art An’ Done

Black Art An’ Done, held in 1981, gave the early grouping a public platform. In a statement associated with the exhibition, Chambers argued that art should contribute to liberation and change. Rasheed Araeen later reproduced the statement in Third Text, preserving a record of the young artist’s forceful position. Chambers wanted an active relationship between art and the conditions of Black life, including the struggle against racism and the connections between oppression in Britain and elsewhere. ⁴

His Destruction of the National Front, dated 1979–80, belonged to this early period. Even its title made the intended political confrontation unmistakable. The demand that art contribute to social change also raised questions which could not be answered once and for all. Who was the work addressing? How clearly should its meaning be stated? Could ambiguity be useful? A strong declaration could rally people while opening an argument about the duties being placed on every Black artist. ⁴

Exhibitions that carried the conversation further

Exhibitions under the title The Pan-Afrikan Connection carried the work into different settings. Piper’s exhibition record includes Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery and a Bristol venue in 1982, followed by the Midland Group in Nottingham and the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry in 1983. These were opportunities to encounter new audiences and different institutional expectations. The sequence shows sustained organising across several cities, rather than a single successful exhibition followed by an immediate disappearance. ⁵

The membership also changed. Chambers’s archive identifies Dominic Dawes, Andrew Hazel and Ian Palmer among those associated with the early grouping, alongside later participants including Claudette Johnson, Wenda Leslie, Marlene Smith and Janet Vernon. Rodney and Piper were part of this developing circle. Lists that reduce the group to a few subsequently prominent men conceal some of that history. Its boundaries were formed through participation in particular exhibitions and projects, and the name describes an evolving association rather than an unchanging cast. ⁶

A national convention in Wolverhampton

On 28 October 1982, the First National Black Art Convention took place at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. The surviving programme, poster and audio archive establish it as an organised occasion with a life beyond later recollection. They also make a practical point about cultural history: invitations, timetables and recordings preserve the work through which a meeting became possible. Without such records, an event can survive chiefly as a famous name, detached from its participants and the questions they brought into the room. ⁷

In his later account, Piper describes competing understandings of Black art at the convention. Araeen advanced a political understanding of Blackness connected with the postcolonial world. Shakka Dedi and others emphasised an African-centred cultural purpose. Members of Black Audio Film Collective brought perspectives shaped by class politics. These were arguments about constituency, history and responsibility, with consequences for which artists might work together and whom their work should address. ⁸

Piper remembers the convention as a particularly important achievement of the group. Bringing people together made differences visible, but it also allowed relationships to form across them. Its value cannot be measured by whether everyone left with the same definition. A network could sustain collaborations and disagreements which continued long after the meeting ended. ⁸

Black women shaping the debate

Claudette Johnson’s presentation at the convention brought the representation of Black women into the centre of discussion. A later Courtauld event, drawing on the convention’s visual and audio records, identifies her intervention as a catalyst for heated debate and a separate discussion among Black women artists. Her work challenged the terms on which Black female subjects had been depicted and understood. Gender was therefore integral to arguments about Black art, rather than an issue to be added after a supposedly shared racial experience had been defined. ⁹

Johnson’s And I Have My Own Business in This Skin, made in 1982, provides a telling title for that insistence on subjectivity. The authority to speak about Black experience could not belong automatically to the loudest or most established participants. Women artists needed space to test their own ideas and relationships. The convention helped make those connections possible, while its disagreements showed how much work remained within the emerging movement itself. ⁹

The working conditions behind the exhibitions

The material circumstances of making art can disappear from accounts built around exhibition titles. In a 2024 conversation with Lubaina Himid, Marlene Smith recalled producing her work of the 1980s and 1990s in domestic spaces, including the living room and kitchen table. She acquired a studio only in 2022. Himid recognised this experience as familiar among Black artists. Their exchange gives a different scale to the history: ambitious public work could begin in a room also needed for everyday life. ¹⁰

Smith’s recollection also cautions against treating a museum’s eventual recognition as a full account of an artist’s working life. Space, storage, materials and time all affect what can be made and kept. The artists’ conversation moves between experimentation, memory and the expectations surrounding a new exhibition. It shows a practice still changing decades after the collective’s best-known period. The story of the group includes the beginnings of such careers without exhausting what those careers became. ¹⁰

Connections across the wider movement

The BLK Art Group belonged to a wider field of activity. The New Museum’s account of Lubaina Himid, John Akomfrah and Piper traces connections through the convention and through later practices involving archives, images and collective work. It also explains that Black, within much of this cultural organising, could describe a political relationship among people of African, Asian and Caribbean descent. That usage was historically specific and debated; it should not be mistaken for a simple statement that everyone shared the same background. ¹¹

These connections help explain why one small association could have an influence extending beyond its own exhibitions. Participants encountered other ways of researching, making and presenting work. A film collective, an abstract painter and an artist working with large figurative drawings could challenge different forms of authority. The relationships between them made the movement broader than a common visual style, allowing collaboration without requiring identical methods or identical conclusions. ¹¹

Work continued after the group

By 1984 the group’s collective momentum was diminishing as members pursued other projects. Its activity helped establish relationships which continued through subsequent exhibitions. ⁸ In 1989, Chambers and Piper were among the artists included in The Other Story, curated by Araeen at the Hayward Gallery. The exhibition brought several generations of artists into a larger account of post-war art. Its later presentations in Wolverhampton and Manchester returned that argument to cities outside London. ¹²

The Other Story included Chambers’s early Destruction of the National Front alongside later works. Placing such pieces in a historical survey changed the setting in which audiences encountered them. Work made within immediate struggles could now be examined as part of an argument about the national collection, artistic inheritance and the omissions of established histories. That recognition did not remove the original political questions; it brought them into another kind of public institution. ¹²

Chambers’s subsequent organising included establishing the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive in 1989. His work as a writer and curator developed alongside the task of documenting artists whose records might otherwise remain scattered. Preserving a catalogue or exhibition notice makes future research possible. The history of Black British art therefore depended on people maintaining evidence as well as creating and showing new work. ¹³

Returning to the records and the artworks

In 2011 Johnson, Smith and Piper established the BLK Art Group Research Project. Its purpose includes documenting and critically examining the movement and the circumstances from which it emerged. The participation of former members gives the project a direct relationship with the history, while its emphasis on enquiry leaves room for reconsideration. Remembering a collective involves deciding which names, objects and disagreements receive attention, and returning to evidence can complicate familiar accounts. ¹

Wolverhampton’s 2023 exhibition The more things change… brought work by Johnson, Piper, Rodney, Smith and Vernon into a renewed examination of the group’s development. The partnership involved the city’s art gallery, its School of Art and the research project, with a public programme connecting the history to another generation. The setting mattered: the city which had hosted the early exhibition and convention was also helping to preserve and reinterpret their consequences. ¹⁴

Reviewing the exhibition, art historian Emily Langridge argued for closer attention to materials and the making of the work. Her discussion of Johnson’s drawing, Vernon’s batiks and jewellery, and Piper’s Pan Afrikan Paintbox asks viewers to consider texture, construction and artistic decisions alongside political meaning. The argument is useful because a historical label can become restrictive. Calling an artist political should begin a conversation about the work, not settle everything that can be noticed in it. ¹⁵

The BLK Art Group’s lasting importance lies in this combination of work and possibility. Its members made particular objects, organised particular exhibitions and created occasions on which difficult arguments could happen. Their example belongs to a history of Black British people building cultural opportunities from the resources available to them. Understanding that achievement requires attention to the varied people involved, the places where they worked and the art itself.

Sources

[1] BLK Art Group Research Project. The BLK Art Group and the Research Project.

[2] Keith Piper. A short history.

[3] Karolina DeResende and Eddie Chambers, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. A conversation with Eddie Chambers; Interview conducted 3 May 2022.

[4] Rasheed Araeen, Third Text 5, reproduced in Eddie Chambers's archive. Eddie Chambers Destruction of the NF; Winter 1988–89.

[5] Keith Piper. Keith Piper curriculum vitae and exhibition history.

[6] Eddie Chambers. BLK Art Group 1983–1984; Archive record of 2011–12 exhibition.

[7] BLK Art Group Research Project. The First National Black Art Convention 1982; Event held 28 October 1982.

[8] Keith Piper, Frieze. Keith Piper on the legacies of the BLK Art Group; 3 March 2023.

[9] The Courtauld. Revisiting the First National Black Art Convention; 21 November 2023.

[10] Marlene Smith and Lubaina Himid, Frieze. Marlene Smith and Lubaina Himid on friendship and collaboration; 13 August 2024.

[11] New Museum Digital Archive. Collective change and fragmenting authority; Summer and autumn 2019.

[12] Eddie Chambers archive. The Other Story; Record of the 1989 exhibition.

[13] Eddie Chambers. Eddie Chambers biography.

[14] City of Wolverhampton Council. City showcases BLK Art Group through The more things change exhibition; 3 April 2023.

[15] Emily Langridge, Midlands Art Papers 6, University of Birmingham. On Exhibit The more things change at Wolverhampton Art Gallery; 2023.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.