Spring Talks – African Atlantic Lives and Visual Culture Research Network
Contact: Jenny Terry j.a.terry@durham.ac.uk
All welcome to these three talks! Network thanks are due to the British Association for American Studies for support via a BAAS Development Grant and the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture (CVAC) at Durham for their community building. Please be in touch if you are interested in joining the network.
Tuesday 28th April, 16.00-17.30, via Teams
Dr Mary Shannon – ‘Regency Visual Culture and the Black Atlantic: Finding Billy Waters’
William ‘Billy’ Waters: busker, sailor, immigrant, amputee, father, lover, extraordinary talent, and a forgotten Black celebrity from Regency London. Like so many marginalised people from the past, however, he left no papers, writings, or diaries, and many basic facts about his life are missing. What remains are the 19th century images of him and Victorian tales of his life. This talk explores how visual culture can be used to ‘fill in’ the gaps and silences in the records we have of past lives, and asks what it might mean to look with, rather than at, Billy Waters and others.
Biography: Dr Mary L. Shannon’s latest book Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale 2024) tells the story of Regency London’s forgotten Black celebrity. It won a 2025 NYC Big Book Award and has been turned into a free graphic novel for classrooms Billy Waters: Songs from the Shadows – Age of Revolution and a show Jump Billy!. Mary is a writer and Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Roehampton, London. She’s the author of the award-winning Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street and you can find her at marylshannon.com.
Tuesday 5th May, 16.00-17.30, via Teams and in person at Durham University (room TBC)
Dr Indie A. Choudhury – ‘Sublimating Time & Afro-Atlantic Remapping: Frank Bowling’s Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman?’
Whilst regarded as a riposte to Barnett Newman, Frank Bowling’s Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman? (1968) was, in fact, a declarative statement of intent towards New York School abstraction as he departed from a figuratively bound England. Bowling’s work speaks more to the creation of a shared lineage and affinity with Newman in their matching ambitions to position themselves within a tradition as well as simultaneously recast it. Like Newman, Bowling was intrinsically concerned with temporal as well as spatial experience. Yet, part of Bowling’s remapping of Newman’s work was to invert his ideas of time and space. Bowling alludes to his own arrival, connecting it to a larger Black diasporic history of his past and contemporary present as a rejoinder to Newman of the existence and significance of multiple and shifting histories and geographies.
Ostensibly one of his most highly regarded and familiar map paintings, this paper resituates the subject of Bowling’s work as an exposition of time and history, both personal and political. Time is sublimated through the spectral cartography of personal mnemonics, dislocated countries and nation states, and the artist’s singular deployment of colour. As a body of work, the Map Paintings (1967-71) underline Bowling’s diasporic identity rather than holding to, or being bound by, any singular claim of national belonging. Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman? Is Bowling’s own temporal odyssey through which he posits a Black diasporic worldview with possibilities for, not just geographical, but temporal reconfiguration.
Biography: Indie A. Choudhury is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art (Global Black Diasporas and Black Studies) at The Courtauld Institute of Art, specializing in the art, sonic, and literary cultures of the Black Atlantic. She is currently working on the first monograph of Frank Bowling’s White Paintings as a body of work spanning over six decades of his career. She received her PhD in art history from Stanford University and has previously worked at Tate and Iniva. Recent publications include Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke University Press, 2025) and Hew Locke: Passages (Yale Center of British Art/Yale University Press, 2025). Recent exhibitions include In Praise of Black Errantry with Unit London at the Venice Biennale 2024.
Tuesday 19th May, 16.00-17.30, via Teams
Prof. Alan Rice – ‘Guerrilla Memorialisation and the Archive of the Black Atlantic in Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Praxis’
My work as a curator and academic has highlighted how artists such as Lubaina Himid, Althea McNish, Godfried Donkor, Ellen Gallagher, Lela Harris, Elisa Moris Vai and Jade de Montserrat work against the silencing of African Atlantic lives and histories through imaginative praxis that refuses the limitations of the archive, creating in the process art works that dialogue with the traditional historical elision of Black lives. I have worked closely with most of these artists, and this talk will show how they disrupt chronologies and geographies to imagine more detailed lives that the archive has often missed. The ways in which these art forms can be curated adds another layer to the study and, in exhibitions at the Whitworth in Manchester (2007), Maritime Museum, Lancaster and the Judges’ Lodgings in Lancaster (2023), I use the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his theories around dialogism to tell more nuanced histories of African Atlantic figures and I will detail this curatorial methodology.
The aim will be to flesh out Saidiya Hartman (“Venus in Two Acts”, 2008) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (Silencing the Past, 1995) call for new praxis when searching for African Atlantic histories and to interrogate the way that visual artists with access to tools beyond the page have been able to create works that imaginatively bring to life figures whom the archival record has sometimes reduced to merely a line of text or even to silence. For instance, Lubaina Himid’s multi-sensory installation Naming the Money (2004) enables 100 representative enslaved Africans narratives that in her words allow us to see “inside the invisible”. The work presents the commodification and dehumanisation of these lives whilst showing their resistance and resilience. She presents dynamic historical biographies from the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that resonate with more modern forms of abuse such as human trafficking and Modern Slavery.
Biography: Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Lancashire, Preston and co-director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR). He has published widely in Black Atlantic Studies. In 2021 he curated the exhibition Lubaina Himid: Memorial to Zong and in 2023 co-curated Facing the Past: Black Lancastrians. With local Black History groups he has created his Lancaster Slave Trade Tour and organised commemortions for the Battle of Bamber Bridge where African American soldiers in WW2 fought Jim Crow racism in Britain. In 2025 he undertook a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and in 2026 he will be the Heinz Heinen Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Dependencies and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn.
