The centrepiece of Black Atlantic Makers: Conversations will be the multi-panel, woven and embroidered Tapestry of Black Britons. The large textile work will be displayed alongside pieces by Black makers represented within the four material areas of the Crafts Study Centre’s (CSC) collections - ceramics, wood, textiles and calligraphy - and loans from other public and private collections. The Tapestry of Black Britons, an evolving artwork, is a collaborative, craft-centred initiative celebrating and documenting little-known strands of British history through textile art. A new panel, African Romans by Kofi Alvin, will premiere at this exhibition. Designs have been translated to the loom by the Bristol-based digital weaving studio Dash & Miller.
Collection items and loaned works will be arranged into a series of conversations that reflect a Black Atlantic consciousness, bringing together well-known, established makers and younger practitioners across generations. Rather than tracing a single career or linear chronology, this approach foregrounds exchange, movement and affinity - key characteristics of Black Atlantic cultural production. These inter-generational dialogues emphasise both continuity and divergence among Black makers, revealing how shared histories and diasporic connections give rise to a wide range of formal and conceptual expressions within each material area.
These pairings that sit alongside these works demonstrate a wider ecology and history of Black British making. For example, Ranti Bam’s Iwa and Lawson Oyekan’s Trial by Light invite reflection on interiority, perforation and light as metaphors for transformation and emergence. Other groupings bring contemporary makers – including Donald Baugh, Darren Appiagyei, Doreen Gittens, Errol Donald, Anthony Amoaka-Attah, Makeba Lewis, Mawuena Kattah and Bisila Noha - into dialogue with earlier and established figures in the field such as Ronald Moody, Althea McNish, Siddig el Nigoumi, Ladi Kwali and Magdalene Odundo, demonstrating how making is understood both as a technical skill and as a way of thinking about history, heritage and connection.
Selected works by Keith Piper, Angela Ford and Marcia Bennett-Male illuminate art as historical intervention utilising a visual language to express the layered nature of diasporic identity and the negotiation of multiple cultural inheritances. In this sense, the Atlantic is not a dividing line but a connective space - a shifting body of water through which ideas move and coalesce.
The approach of the exhibition - of pairing makers of different generations and working across a range of materials - is a deliberate strategy designed to move away from a focus on the individual and indicates, within the modest scale of the exhibition, the sheer variety of expression in Black British making. The de-emphasis of specific individuals matches the narrative and communitarian ethos integral to the Tapestry of Black Britons and represents a unique way of addressing the historic under-representation of Black makers at the CSC and elsewhere.
The conversations
(Wood) Ronald Moody – Darren Apagagyei, Donald Bough; (Ceramics) Magdalene Odundo – Bisilia Noha, Mawuena Kattah; (Textiles) Althea McNish – Doreen Gittens, Marcia Bennett-Male’ (Textiles) Makeba Lewis – Anthony Amoaka-Attah; (Ceramics) Lawson Oyekan – Ranti Bam; (Calligraphy) Siddig el Nigoumi – Errol Donald
