England’s Walker Gallery Opens Groundbreaking Exhibit Featuring Over 40 Black Female Artists

Before the 'Conversations' exhibit, the Walker Gallery only had two pieces created by Black women out of its over 13,000-piece collection.

Sumuyya Khader, a Liverpool-based artist and curator, opened up to The Guardian about a new exhibit in the Walker Gallery that centers the work of Black women and opened on Oct 18.

“Conversations” is Walker’s newest show and it features over 40 different Black female and nonbinary artists. Prior to this show, Khader noted that the museum severely lacked diversity in its pieces.

“We are surrounded by deceased white males,” she described. The Gallery only had two artworks by Black women before the launching of “Conversations.”

“I was always told when I was younger to look up,” Khader continued. “But you get to the point where you look up and think these histories are so torrid. I want people to go in, hear the beat and the bass, and be like, ‘Oh!’”

The first part of the show greets patrons with sound rather than a physical traditional piece. Khader referenced a work by Zinzi Minott called “Bloodsound” as a perfect introduction to the “Conversations” Gallery. Minott’s piece features a wall of transparent speakers filled with a red sugar-based liquid – an artistic reminder that the blasting reggae music that reaches over the exhibit hall isn’t just entertainment but comes from a history rooted in sugar plantations across the Caribbean.

The soundtrack played by the speakers is a mix of over 200 samples from Jamaican music legends like Marcia Griffiths. The recognizable samples are interspersed with field recordings from Notting Hill carnival, an interview with Minott’s grandmother conducted just a few weeks before her passing, and a speech by former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom Nye Bevan about the creation of the NHS.

Minott said of the piece, “I didn’t want it to feel like a party. There are bits where you recognize the song, but then it cuts … you can’t get too lost in it.”

“Conversations” were spearheaded after the Walker Gallery staffing and curators realized the gallery only had two pieces created by Black female artists out of it extensive 13,000-piece collection. The pieces by Edmonia Lewis and Lubaina Himid revealed a stark lack of diversity in their gallery that exists across the British art world, even in places like Liverpool with historically settled Black populations. Now, the Walker Gallery showcases influential artists from the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, including the “Conversations” show, featuring historic names like Maud Sulter, Claudette Johnson, and Himid. However, the Gallery also totes a newer generation of Black artists with the likes of Joy Labinjo and Olivia Sterling.

Sharon Walters, one of the many artists who have work in the gallery now, said, “I hope it inspires. There has been that feeling of taking up space, but this truly is taking up space.”

Khader told The Guardian she hopes this new show is just the beginning of a change of culture in the art world, greater than just getting more paintings by Black artists on the walls of galleries.

She expressed, “I’m the only Black person on my team, and we’re talking about acquiring Black art but you’re uncomfortable talking about Blackness? So where does that leave what we acquire? That’s my fear.”

She added, “Those scales need to tip to the point where a show like this shouldn’t be seen as radical or different. It’s not – it’s just a contemporary art show.”

“I can’t think of any spaces in London that have shown anything like this. It’s really important for Black women, both as artists and as human beings, because it just hasn’t been done before,” Khader continued. She hoped that “Conversations” in the Walker Gallery would also begin to expand Black art outside of just England’s capital so that it would be more accessible to all of those who wanted to see it.

“Why can’t people come to us? Because we have the calibre,” Khader said.