Why we asked pioneering Black artists to depict the radical heroes of our past

When I first read the Cotton Capital magazine, I was blown away by the images in its pages. These original works of art were commissioned to stand on their own alongside the journalism itself, and they had a huge impact on me.

I began to think about how art could function like a piece of reporting or research that corrects the historical record. So I asked the Guardian’s arts and culture writer Lanre Bakare, who was special correspondent on the Cotton Capital project and led the commissioning of many of these portraits, to explain the thinking behind their inclusion.

“First, we were putting together this magazine that had a lot of these big long pieces that were fantastic,” Lanre said, “so we were keen to break things up visually.”

But it was not just a logistical choice. “We also saw an incredible opportunity to be able to work with celebrated artists like Claudette Johnson, Keith Piper and Marlene Smith, and give them another platform to work with,” he said. “They were all part of the BLK Art Group in the early 1980s, and they pioneered putting this kind of stuff into their work. They were talking about colonialism and anti-Black racism in a British context 40 years ago.”

I was particularly moved to see these portraits of radical figures who resisted transatlantic slavery and its legacies – from African American abolitionists to Mancunian activists. These commissions introduced me to figures such as T Ras Makonnen, a vocal anti-imperialist who played a key role in the landmark 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, and Sarah Parker Remond, a powerful speaker who lectured in the US and UK.

For Lanre, there was a powerful message in commissioning these pioneering artists to depict pioneering radical figures from the past. When you read the magazine and see these artworks, you’re not just learning about history, you are watching how it gets written. “It’s powerful because when you create a portrait of someone, you are saying this person is of worth, and has historically been very important.”

To learn more about how art can help us reinterpret history and challenge the official record, I interviewed the art historian Anna Arabindan-Kesson, whose research looks at the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined. First, some other stories to check out.

My experience of art history begins and ends with the movie Mona Lisa Smile, so I was excited to sit down with this week’s expert, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, an associate professor in the department of African American studies and the department of art and archaeology at Princeton, and author of Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World.

Anna left Sri Lanka with her family after the outbreak of the civil war. She trained as a nurse in New Zealand before becoming an art historian. “For me, it was really about trying to find something that connected migration and movement with the relationship between vision and value. How the way that we see shapes who and what we value,” she said.

Anna isn’t interested in an illustrated history of cotton. She is instead drawn to examine what she describes as, “the visual and material associations between Blackness and cotton”. I asked her to explain what she meant by that: “Cotton is often used to symbolise global connection. It forced me to ask, ‘Who is doing the work? What is missing in that broad view of global connectivity?’”

The immediate image that comes to mind when many people think about plantations is that of enslaved people who are bent over, “but at the same time cotton is also seen as something so banal”. Anna points to a time, in 2019, when African American students went to a governor’s house in Virginia and the governor’s wife handed them cotton. “Everyone thought, do you realise what you’ve just done? You’ve given a young African American child some cotton to hold and touch. How can you not realise this history and be really affected by it? It’s because it’s so embedded.”

She is particularly excited by the artists Lubaina Himid (pictured above), Yinka Shonibare and Hank Willis Thomas, who draw on official collections and archives and disrupt them. “These artists gave me new ways of thinking about how to approach something like this because as an art historian, there isn’t an archive of ready-made objects I can work with.”

She gives examples: “Lubaina has been creating a counter-archive to those official narratives and official collections. Hank is looking at digital archives and repurposing them in different ways; and the work Yinka (pictured above) does on textiles is drawing on these official archives to create installations and artwork that’s asking us to imagine other kinds of stories that we might not find otherwise.”

When asked which artist has had the most profound impact on how she thinks of cotton, Anna points to Himid. “She gave me new ways to look through the archive. She talks a lot about how she tried to imagine the way that cotton literally and physically connected Manchester factory workers with enslaved people – by wondering if there was blood on the cotton, or even a bit of skin. That image really stuck with me when I went and looked at these textiles, looking at plantation ledger books.”

She believes this way of seeing art can go on to challenge you as a writer. “It requires writing in a really different way. It forces you to try to push the limit to what you can say and how you can tell the story about someone who’s completely erased from the official history.”

Anna was keen to add that there was a lot of hope in this art. “These artists are still finding joy, and showing us how to have joy and showing us that despite all of the things, despite all this violence, Black and brown people have always been creating these amazing forms of collective joy, community and kinship. That is also a way to move forward.”