Supervised by Professor Dorothy Price, Executive Dean and Deputy Director, and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History, Courtauld Institute of Art; and Dr Hilary Floe, Senior Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain
October 2021–
Oku Ampofo
Libation to the Ancestors 1959
Courtesy Oku Ampofo Foundation
Photo © Hattie Spires
My research takes the Harlem Renaissance as a visible point of change in the visual arts during the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and explores whether the ideas behind the art, artists and writers associated with the movement may be traced through Pan-African independence movements and solidarity networks to the practice of artists in Britain and former ‘Commonwealth’ countries in West Africa and the Caribbean.
Harlem Renaissance scholarship has traditionally considered the movement to be a national school – in fact, defined more narrowly to upper Manhattan – yet a significant number of its key contributors travelled extensively and were based mainly outside of the city of New York. My research resists the orthodox scholarship that explores the Harlem–Paris axis, instead tracing the networks of cross-cultural exchange via the threads of the end of the British Empire in a move to disrupt canonical histories of Western modernism.
Using Tate collection works as a starting point and drawing on material in key archives across the Black Atlantic, the project will trace the conversations, travels and connections between the figures from this time to re-examine the work through a new lens and consider a more globalised art history.
About Hattie Spires
Hattie Spires is a curator, researcher and writer based in London. Hattie has worked in curatorial roles with Hayward Touring, assisting with the organisation of British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (2010), Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing (2013), Listening (2014). At Tate Britain she worked on Rachel Whiteread (2017), All Too Human (2018), Van Gogh and Britain (2019) and Turner’s Modern World (2020). Recent Publications include two short volumes: Tate Introductions Van Gogh (2019) and Summer: Highlights from the Tate Collection (2020), and she has written for several exhibition catalogues, Art UK and the journal Visual Culture in Britain.
Instagram @hattie__spires