Paul Mellon Centre
16 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA
20 October 2022
Convened by Marie Bak Mortensen and Leanne Petersen, Create London
This seminar hoped to interrogate the recent large-scale commissions of Black artists to create public artworks which celebrate and highlight the Windrush generation and wider aspects of British/Caribbean history in the public realm. The event started with an onsite introduction to the latest Fourth Plinth commission Antelope by Samson Kambalu from Jo Baxendale, Senior Policy Officer at the GLA. This was followed by a tour led by Create London Producer, Leanne Petersen of the Hackney Windrush Commissions by Veronica Ryan OBE and Thomas J Price before arriving at the Paul Mellon Centre for two seminar sessions. Session One: Commissioning Public Artworks – Contemporary Ideas, Politics, and Motivations and Session Two: The Burden of Representation: An in Conversation with Artist Jeanette Elhers.
For the first session, Curator Eleanor Pinfield, who currently serves as Head of Art on the Underground and Coach-Mentor, Creative Producer and Community Activator Binki Taylor from Brixton Project were invited – alongside Create’s Director Marie Bak Mortensen – to present and widen this discussion on commissioning strategies in the public realm. The second session was a remote in conversation with artist Jeanette Elhers who spoke about their shortlisted proposal for the Waterloo Windrush Commission and their 2018 co-produced sculpture I am Queen Mary in Copenhagen.
The convenors were keen for this to be a shared learning event and the table discussion was fundamental to facilitating these conversational style sessions between attendees. This set-up allowed guests to raise questions, make suggestions and observations about the strategies in place, past outcomes and future prospects. The first session was particularly fruitful as there was broad acknowledgement that we are at the beginning of a discourse and that mistakes are acceptable. As Bikini Taylor from the Brixton Project explained, one of the many feats when working in the public realm and with local communities is to help them to understand that ‘one work is not going to cover everything’. The pressure faced by organisations to ‘get it right’ often overshadows the need to start considering whether it is helpful to segregate artists into different ethnic categories. Should the burden of being a Black artist prevent you from producing art that is more joyous or offer commissioning opportunities that are not about addressing social injustice issues and colonial narrative.
