Visual Artist

Lubaina Himid's identities include being a black British woman born in Zanzibar, a visual artist, an academic, a cultural activist, a curator, and since December 2017, a Turner Prize winner. As principal researcher leading the project, "Making Histories Visible," Himid underscores the "gaps in history that are not being filled" and as she pointedly states, "I only know how to paint." Certainly with Turner Prize recognition, her skilled and nuanced painting has finally been recognized and awarded within the British art scene and internationally. What is perhaps less well known is the work that Himid has consistently undertaken since the 1980s to support other black artists. Himid's "Making Histories Visible" research informs much of her art and as Elizabeth Fullerton notes, "not only was Himid a pivotal presence in the black British arts movement, she has tirelessly promoted her black female peers such as Claudette Johnson, Maud Sulter, and Ingrid Pollard, who have struggled against the double whammy of racism and sexism, their stories conspicuously absent from most art-historical narratives." Himid's on-going concern with "how to tell the story of the slave trade without depicting bleeding, dying Africans, to highlight those huge questions about belonging, those huge questions about the diasporan population" and so on amplifies the focus of this Special Issue of Callaloo. Of particular significance is her statement, "Going through my mind all the time are those journeys that Africans made in the hold of ships, that horrific int oduction to this monster called the sea."