Reimagining British Art: The Contributions of Transnational Artists in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s

Starting in the 1950s, a myth of Britishness was perpetuated through criteria established by British Council surveys and the Tate collection, which failed to acknowledge the contributions of transnational and immigrant artists living and working in England. Consequently, artists such as Kim Lim, David Medalla, Rasheed Araeen, Richard (Show-yu) Lin, and Li Yuan-chia were excluded from traditional narratives of British art. The polemics surrounding post-war British art largely ignored the complexity of the sociological, cultural, and topographical reality in which the art was created. Exclusionary practices in canon formation continued through the 1970s; for instance, the first Hayward Annual survey of British Art included only one non-white artist. In recent years, curatorial interventions and decolonial institutional efforts to enlarge the notion of British have led to a post hoc repositioning of transnational artists with complex genealogies. An additive approach fails to fully account for the factors that contributed to the absence of such artists from institutionalized histories of British art or assess the fields or communities in which their work and practice should be situated. This panel aims to contribute to an expanded art historical field comprising Lim, Medalla, Araeen, Lin, Li, and other artists working in post-war Britain who have been overlooked due to limited canonical and ethnonationalist readings of their work. We invite submissions that delve into the complexity of post-war British art by addressing systemic omissions, overlooked artists, and recent remedial curatorial efforts to broaden the scope of artistic practices encompassed by the term ‘British Art’.