Art history is often taught as a clearly defined, factual narrative. Its colonial view is unchallenged within many curricula, its celebrated artists and major movements mostly white and male. Journalist and curator Alayo Akinkugbe has dedicated her career to reframing the Western canon. She graduated from Cambridge with an art history degree in 2021, followed by a ‘curating the art museum’ MA from the Courtauld in 2023. Already, her Instagram account ‘A Black History of Art’ and podcast A Shared Gaze have devoted followings. Both celebrate the contributions of Black artists, sitters, curators and thinkers on the history of art and today’s world.
Akinkugbe’s new book, Reframing Blackness, explores how Black figures have been presented and viewed within western art, from the education system to national museums. “I think it comes down to how art history is perceived and taught in schools and universities,” she tells me, when we speak ahead of the book’s launch. “In order to encourage more Black people to take art history, this perception of it as a very elite pursuit needs to change. I think that’s the core of everything. It would make it more appealing if we were presented with a diverse art history at school and university. From the beginning, things should be questioned.”
Akinkugbe remembers only one paper that focused on Black art throughout her studies at Cambridge; the degree traced the ancient Greeks to twentieth-century figures such as Andy Warhol. “That approach is so backwards,” she says. “It shouldn’t be up to Black students and people who are interested in decolonizing their perspectives to unlearn.” Appropriation by twentieth-century artists such as Picasso was also glossed over, with their works discussed as original and formative, rather than seen in the context of the African art and masks that greatly informed them. “That indebtedness and the influence they took from these objects is sidelined.”
She describes the lack of acknowledgement for the formative role of Black artists throughout history as a ‘void’. Confronting that means filling gaps and expanding knowledge that has traditionally been suppressed. Exhibition catalogues of group shows focusing on Black art history are a key source for Akinkugbe. She cites the exhibition catalogue for ‘Posing Modernity – The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today’ as crucial. The show was created as a partnership between Paris’ Musée d’Orsay and The Wallach Art Gallery at Colombia University, with curator Denise Murrell challenging the treatment of Black subjects in works such as Manet’s Olympia; the painting features a Black, unnamed maid in the background, who was later identified as a model named Laure.
“It’s been absolutely foundational for the way I look at art history,” says Akinkugbe of Denise’s curation and writing. “The fact I could centre the muse and think about their identity and role in creating the painting.” She also watches talks by writers such as bell hooks and panel discussions between artists. “That really gets my mind buzzing and thinking about things differently.” Museum websites are a regular resource, with Akinkugbe searching archives for artists and muses she hasn’t heard of or seen before.
While representation of Black artists within gallery spaces is crucial, Akinkugbe is keen to spotlight the roles that sit outside of art making in the traditional sense, whether it’s the sitter or museum director. One chapter of Reframing Blackness focuses on curators, with Akinkugbe interviewing four who have centred their practice on correcting or presenting new narratives around Blackness and art history. She features the late Venice Biennale curator Koyo Kouoh discussing her landmark exhibition and book When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting; Antwaun Sargent on his New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion; Ekow Eshun exploring his iconic Hayward show, podcast series and book In the Black Fantastic.
“I was trying to get to the bottom of why all of them had this impulse to redress the historical narrative and focus on Blackness,” Akinkugbe tells me. “You can be a Black curator and decide not to do that. For all of them, it was tied to their own experiences and life; like a calling.” Simultaneously, she highlights the potential for Black curators to become pigeonholed. “Just as artists can feel boxed in by being attached to their identity, the same thing can happen to curators. Some can feel there is no other path, as this is how they are ‘acceptable’ to the establishment, [which wants] this Black presence or face to tick a box.”
Reframing Blackness celebrates numerous artists who directly or indirectly redress the canon. Akinkugbe mentions Naudline Pierre, an electrifying contemporary painter who features in the first chapter. The daughter of a Haitian minister, her works reflect the spiritual potency of western religious paintings. “They’re very powerful, with the same magnificence as a Renaissance altarpiece,” says Akinkugbe. She also references Barbara Walker, whose Vanishing Point series plays with erasure and visibility in literal means through her materials. Walker’s works reimagine famous paintings, embossed in white paper with only the Black figures rendered exquisitely in pencil. “I think it embodies a feeling that a lot of Black people get when they visit a European museum and pick out the Black figures, really noticing where they are. Usually they’re at the sidelines, or serving,” says Akinkugbe. “Walker’s series makes that sensation very visual. Her art embodies what it is I’m trying to do in the book, which is get people to shift their gaze and focus on Black narratives for a moment.”
Another chapter of Reframing Blackness explores the changing position of the Black muse. Over the years, numerous institutions have retitled works or added context to the Black sitters within their collection. A shift in wording can change the sitter from a position of objecthood to subjecthood. “It might originally have been a generic title, like Study of a Negro. If you come to that work, you’re not going to learn anything about who that person might have been.” Akinkugbe discusses an 1861 painting of Fanny Eaton in Yale Center for British Art’s collection that has seen several title changes. The objectifying Head of a Mulatto Woman was used by the Royal Academy in 1901, while the work’s current title Fanny Eaton (née Antwistle or Entwistle) acknowledges her personhood. Fanny, a mixed-race woman born in Jamaica to a mother who had been freed from slavery, was a muse to numerous pre-Raphelite artists.
While studying, Akinkugbe saw the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests creating a powerful shift in the contemporary art world’s language and curatorial decisions. Already, she tells me, the conversation has shifted – especially troubling considering the U.S. government’s destruction of diversity programmes, with multiple institutional leads removed from their positions. Her work feels ever more urgent. “Across the board there was an increased interest in Black narrative and Black stories [in 2020],” she says. “There were increased opportunities for Black creatives. Now I can see that was a definitive moment, and maybe it has made some lasting changes, but ultimately it feels the conversation has regressed.”
Alayo Akinkugbe’s Reframing Blackness is available here.
Alayo wears the TOAST Stripe Donegal V Neck Tank and Relaxed Wide Leg Denim Trousers, and
The Barbican’s Level 2 foyer has been transformed with works by contemporary artist Huma Bhabha as part of the Encounters: Giacometti series of exhibitions, which run until May 2026.
Words by Emily Steer.
Photography by Leia Morrisson.
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