An Interview with Pearl Lam and Alayo Akinkugbe
In Episode 2 of The Pearl Lam Podcast, Alayo Akinkugbe and gallerist Pearl Lam discuss the representation of African artists.
“At no point did we study an African artist actually,” Alayo Akinkugbe, the founder of the Instagram page @ablackhistoryofart reveals to Pearl Lam (林明珠) in the latest episode of The Pearl Lam Podcast. The art historian discusses the lack of African artists represented in her Cambridge history of art degree.
This was in response to Pearl Lam’s question: “What is your take on African art in general?”
Akinkugbe explained to Pearl Lam (林明珠) that she only studied “a handful” of Black artists who were all based in the UK and US during her course, adding that “never did we think about or touch Africa, really”.
This lack of African representation in her studies led Akinkugbe to launch her social media page to discover about the Black history of art. She told Pearl Lam that “I was interested in the way that Black people were represented in the kind of European art that I was studying and also in learning about Black artists throughout art history.”
Pearl Lam (林明珠), the doyenne of the contemporary art world, who earlier this year returned from her first visit to Lagos, Nigeria, shares her take on the subject. “Western artists are more conceptual. In Africa, what I’ve seen is, many artists don’t even understand what conceptual art is about…Again, [art] is being judged through the lens of the West. As I always say, this is called cultural colonisation.”
Akinkugbe shares a similar viewpoint to Pearl Lam, saying: “Partly the reason why African art in general has been viewed as this kind of separate thing is because everyone who is an authority on art history or people who are sort of framing and shaping the way art history develops, is looking at it from at outsider’s perspective.”
Akinkugbe and Pearl Lam agree that the best way to combat this vacuum in understanding is by Africans themselves writing about art and the way that history has developed on the continent, especially by covering the nuances of the numerous countries, languages and distinct cultures the continent has.
The diversity within each country, which Akinkugbe points out to Pearl Lam, has cultures so different “that probably have no business being a country”, due to maps drawn during European colonisation, makes defining what contemporary African art is more challenging. “So we can’t say like, this what African art is, or this is what contemporary African art is.”
A recent example of what Akinkugbe’s page shows is the case of Bélizaire, a 15-year old enslaved Black child, who was painted out of an 1837 family portrait of a Southern white enslaver. The painting was recently acquired by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. On this subject, Akikugbe wrote that the painting reminded her about how Titus Kaphar’s ‘Shifting the Gaze’ painting showed the reverse.
Akinkugbe tells Pearl Lam that “He covers up the white figures in his copy of Hals’ painting, to draw attention to the Black figure about whom there is no information. To quote Kaphar, ‘what I’m trying to show you, is how to shift your gaze, just slightly, just momentarily.’”
The @ablackhistoryofart page now acts as an influential platform on the subject of the Black history of art, having gathered over 62,000 followers since the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.
Written by: The Producer, The Pearl Lam Podcast
