This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
It can take decades for an artistic project to stake its claim on art history. Connecting Thin Black Lines at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts reconstructs and reappraises a seminal exhibition which took place at the gallery forty years ago.
The Thin Black Line was one of three shows organised by the artist Lubaina Himid in London institutions in the early 1980s that foregrounded (primarily) black female artists. These exhibitions proclaimed their significance even as they were being installed and, given that they took place alongside significant developments like the foundation of the BLK Art Group, are understood to be cornerstones of black British art.
Himid’s work, as well as the practices of Sonia Boyce, Veronica Ryan and Claudette Johnson who also participated in both exhibitions, is recognised today for aesthetically challenging ethnic representation in art institutions.
It is surprising, however, to discover amongst the archival and administrative minutiae of the ICA’s retelling that building identitarian pressures was the key interest for the artists even then. Both exhibitions’ self-assured stances blur the line between art and activism in a manner we mistakenly associate with a more recent past.
Connecting reassembles parts of the original show, mixing them with the 11 artists’ later output. Some of the works, bizarrely, are only reproduced in the catalogue, as though today’s curators lacked conviction in the art’s ability to make its case from the walls.
Of the pieces on show, the most imposing is a 1986 triptych of larger-than-life, three-quarter portraits of black women by Johnson. The painter recalls asking her subjects to “occupy as much space as possible”, to reach “beyond the frame”.
This is a sound strategy for an artist wishing to carve out a niche for her subjects in the art canon. Johnson, however, continued to speak of status anxiety throughout her career, despite being included in major exhibitions and the Turner Prize last year.
She made her Trilogy whilst still at art school. She wasn’t, however, the youngest artist to take part in the 1985 exhibition. Already before she turned 20, the late photographer Brenda Agard pronounced that her practice countered false media representations of black communities.
Alongside a couple of her photographs and show posters, Connecting reproduces a quotation from her 1986 BBC interview in which she claimed that “[black artists] built institutions such as the ICA”. This text, alongside the young artist’s suggestion that black artists must “start reclaiming [their] territory”, is displayed as though it were an artwork. Its contestable — if not nonsensical — claim, therefore, receives no curatorial or art historical challenge.
The archival materials on display throw light on a collective propensity to confuse exclusion from cultural life — the reality for many minority-ethnic artists in the 1980s — with entitlement to recognition. Further, they refuse to acknowledge support and recognition when received.
In an autobiographical text listing many accolades, the artist Sutapa Biswas salutes her fellow black and brown British artists “who survived”.
What survival was is not clear: correspondence between Biswas and the ICA’s then-curator Iwona Blazwick, for example, suggests no reluctance on behalf of the institution to advocate for the exhibiting artists. It is thus difficult today to distinguish between discrimination and its positive counterpart (or between bravado and propaganda), let alone to account for their historical effects.
Biswas’s contribution to Connecting is a spectacular, but unengaging 2004 film diptych. In three static shots, Birdsong captures the interior of an 18th century manor in which a young boy shares the space with a horse bridled for the hunt.
This work was inspired by the artist’s son’s first words. In the gallery, its fantastical juxtaposition of a child’s fancy and the quaint English custom — intended to lampoon the incongruity of inviting an animal from the stable into the culture — stretches conceptual bounds and Britain’s social history beyond credibility.
Rice n Peas, Sonia Boyce’s 1982 pastel portrait of a young woman eating, offers a more comfortable story of her second-generation migrant upbringing that included both salt fish and bangers and mash.
Alongside it, the extraordinary charcoal Mr Close-friend-of-the-family pays a visit whilst everyone else is out, which depicts Boyce receiving the advances of a man, also reflects the artist’s personal turmoil. Such internality must have been out of place in The Thin Black Line; Connecting relegates it to the exhibition pamphlet.
Indeed, the original exhibition may have radicalised Boyce, whose practice later turned to reflect on the social form through improvisation. To its detriment, sadly.
The artist’s 2022 British pavilion at the Venice Biennale, for example, was a featureless homage to the black women who, according to her, made today’s British music. The political mannerisms of that project echoed 1985, and its lack of attention to the aesthetic matched the ICA’s reconstruction.
Connecting Thin Black Lines cannot account for any of this. Yet the exhibition is an important document that challenges many of the projections of the 1980s and the artists who set one narrative of contemporary art for decades. That it does this unwittingly becomes a warning against unstudied calls for “reclaiming” institutions, which are today of a different tone.
Connecting the Thin Black Lines 1985–2025 continues at ICA, London until 7 September.
