Modern, Minimal, Practical, and Social: the Art of Rasheed Araeen
- Region: London
- Type: Talk
- Cost: Free
Join us for the final two lectures in our 2025 Paul Mellon Lectures series, ‘Modern, Minimal, Practical, and Social: the Art of Rasheed Araeen’ delivered by Courtney J. Martin, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in December.
12 December: Wolverhampton 1982, “Art & Black Consciousness” vs. Form, Functioning and Future
In the autumn of 1982, Araeen was invited by the Wolverhampton Young Black Artists’ (WYBA) to the First National Black Art Convention to discuss the Form, Functioning and Future of Black Art. By the early 1980s, Araeen’s public discussions of Black art in London cast him as its founding practitioner. In that moment, his role in shaping the discourse of Black art was aided by younger artists of African, Asian and Caribbean descent. These artists realised Araeen’s conception of an avant-garde art that was both politically driven in content and materially distressed.
15 December: The Other Story and After
By the 1980s, Araeen’s editorial and curatorial endeavours culminated in The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain, supposedly the first major museum exhibition of non-white British artists in Britain. Curated by Araeen at the Hayward Gallery in London, The Other Story served as a compendium of the work of Black artists in the previous decade toward recognition in the British and art publics, such as the abstract painter Frank Bowling. Bowling’s inclusion in the exhibition and Anish Kapoor’s refusal to be a part of it shaped a discourse around what abstract art had come to mean in Britain by the end of the 1980s.
Paul Mellon Lecture Series
Named in honour of the philanthropist and collector of British art, Paul Mellon (1907–99), these biennial lectures are given by a distinguished historian of British art and were inaugurated in 1994 when Professor Francis Haskell delivered the first series at the National Gallery in London. The model for the series was the Andrew W. Mellon lectures, established in 1949 in honour of Paul Mellon’s father, the founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Co-organised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC) and the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), the lectures are biennial, given by a distinguished historian of British art. This lecture series will take place at both the National Gallery in London and at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.
Courtney J. Martin became the Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2024. Previously she was the Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art. An art historian, curator and professor, Courtney began working with the New York-based Dia Art Foundation in 2015 and was appointed Deputy Director and Chief Curator in 2017. She previously taught at Brown University and worked at the Ford Foundation. She earned a PhD in art history from Yale University. She is on the Board of Directors of the Henry Moore Foundation, The Chinati Foundation and the Center for Curatorial Leadership.