Black British Artists and Political Activism: 'She is not Bullet Proof'
Channel: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Date: 2021-12-16

Public Lecture Course – Alice Correia, Marlene Smith

9 December 2021

This is session six [session 3 was not recorded and session 5 was cancelled] of the Black British Artists and Political Activism series. In this session, Marlene Smith in conversation with Alice Correia ​attends to Smith's seminal work Good Housekeeping I (1985). They consider its aesthetic and political implications against the backdrop of racist, and often violent, policing practices that led to the shooting of Deborah 'Cherry' Groce in 1985 and, more recently, became the focus of activisms arising from the Black Lives Matter movement.

The series ran every Thursday from 4 November to 9 December from 18.30 to 20.00. It was broadcast live as a Zoom webinar. 

About the speakers
Alice Correia is an art historian. Her research examines late twentieth-century British art, with a specific focus on artists of African, Caribbean, and South Asian heritage. She is currently Research Curator at Touchstones Rochdale, and has previously worked at Tate Britain, Government Art Collection and the universities of Sussex and Salford. In 2017 she was a mid-career Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, where she initiated her on-going research project, Articulating British Asian Art Histories. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally titled, South Asian Women Artists in Britain, and her articles have appeared in Art History; British Art Studies; Journal of British Visual Culture; and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. She is Chair of Trustees of the journal Third Text.

Marlene Smith is an artist and curator, and one of the founding members of BLK Art Group.