At RAMM we believe it is important to explore and celebrate Black history, heritage, and art all-year-round. For Black History Month 2023 we’re looking back at celebrations of Black history over the past year at RAMM.
Windrush 75
On 22 June the Devon Windrush Group held their Windrush 75 celebrations at the museum, marking 75 years since the famous ship Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury with over 450 people from the Caribbean answering the call from Britain, the mother country, to help rebuild after World War 2.
With live music, storytelling, dance, cooking demonstrations and exhibitions and information explaining why Windrush 75 is so significant. Actor and playwright Neville Connor performed his work ‘Farewell Jamaica’. Attendees also learned about Caribbean people who have contributed to life and work in Devon, in many different professions, and the impact which climate change is already having in the Caribbean. BBC Spotlight attended and reported from the event. Read more on BBC News.
Museum of Colour My Words Response Gallery videos
In winter and spring 2023 we shared videos from the Museum of Colour’s My Words Response Gallery launch, held at RAMM last September. The videos capture live poetry, being read by the poets who contributed to the My Words Response Gallery.
The My Words gallery is a permanent digital exhibition of portraits of artists of colour, making visible those who collectively have made a significant change to our understanding of poetry and spoken word in Britain. The My Words Response Gallery brought poets and spoken word performers together to create pieces in response to RAMM’s collections. The 10 poets have experienced RAMM’s collections, either through a physical or online visit, and chosen aspects to respond to in their work.
View the full playlist on YouTube. You can also experience the My Words: Encore currently taking place on the Museum of Colour’s Instagram channel.
Nahem Shoa – Portrait of Desmond
In February we were delighted to add artist and painter Nahem Shoa’s work Portrait of Desmond to the RAMM Courtyard wall. Shoa is an award-winning contemporary London painter, who serves on RAMM’s Contemporary Arts Panel. He is known for his oil paintings, and for having increased the number of portraits of Black and mixed-race British people on display in British museums. Portrait of Des is a pensive, technically skilled work which brings a sense of intimacy and thoughtfulness to the Courtyard’s core wall.
When he donated this portrait to RAMM in 2014, Shoa recalled painting it in London: “For me it was the most complete portrait I have ever painted in a single sitting… I was investigating in oil paint all the nuances of colour that there are in all different types black skin, not dissimilar to the way Lucien Freud or Euan Uglow both explored white skin. It may surprise people that when I painted black portraits I never used black or brown oil paint in my palette; in fact I have always used the same colours in my palette to paint both white and black people.
‘Many of my black friends who posed for me many times over a ten year period felt that when they go to museums the only images of black people are slaves or servants, which they all found very negative. I wanted to readdress this issue… because I think it’s important for cultural institutions to reflect in positive and powerful way the diversity of our society today.’
View the portrait on the RAMM Collections Explorer website.
Cyrus Austin’s silver hip flask
Cyrus Austin was a Black American serviceman, who served in the Canadian army during the First World War. He served in France, but spent time in Exeter in 1917-18 while recuperating in hospital.
He won this silver plated hip flask during a Whist Drive at Barnfield Hall, Exeter on 11 January 1918. The hip flask has recently been acquired by RAMM and will go in display in the museum in the near future.
Find out more on RAMM’s Collections website.
Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit goes on display at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum
Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit is the most celebrated portrait in RAMM’s collection. Following its 2022 starring role in RAMM’s exhibition In Plain Sight: Transatlantic slavery and Devon, the portrait went on display this summer as part of the Fitzwilliam exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance.
The exhibition brings together artworks and objects from the Caribbean, West Africa, South America and Europe to ask questions about the museum’s own involvement with the transatlantic slave trade – and, in doing so, to interrogate wider histories of human exploitation.
In Plain Sight: RAMM’s educational resources on the transatlantic slave trade
If you are teaching, or learning about, the transatlantic slave trade, this recently-published page of resources will help you. You could deepen your knowledge about the local impact and Devon’s involvement by exploring some of the information and real objects in RAMM in Exeter. Find out more.
RAMM agreed that the information from ‘In Plain Sight’ should survive beyond the length of the exhibition. On our collections website, you will find links to the full exhibition text, videos and articles that explore biographies and local stories in more depth.
