Captured Beauty

Denzil Forrester, Witchdoctor, 1983. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist

Image caption: Denzil Forrester, Witchdoctor, 1983. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist

An Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme Exhibition, curated by Abi Hutchinson, Artistic Director of Black Voices Cornwall.

Captured Beauty features contemporary works of art drawn from the Arts Council Collection, with paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Denzil Forrester, Ryan Mosely, Mowbray Odonkor, and Caroline Walker. Vanley Burke, Tarik Chawdry, and Colin Jones present photographic portraits of Britain in the 70s and 80s, alongside other artists using photography including Sunil Gupta, Ifeoma Onyefulu, Horace Ove, Tetsuya Noda, and Veronica Ryan.

Read Captured Beauty wall labels as a PDF

Listen to Curator of Captured Beauty and Artistic Director of Black Voices Cornwall, Abi Hutchinson talk about some of the work on show as well as the ambitions of the exhibition in this interview with Cornwall Live.

Black Voices Cornwall is an organisation that exists to enable Cornwall to become an actively anti-racist county. The ambition for Captured Beauty is for ethnically diverse visitors to feel seen through the works in this exhibition. It is also an opportunity for the white community to have an insight to how it feels to be a person of colour in the 21st century, and to come away from the exhibition with a determination to finally end racism.

Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange is an Arts Council Collection National Partner. The Arts Council Collection is managed by Southbank Centre, London on behalf of Arts Council England.

Find out more about the Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme.

Please note: dogs are not permitted in the gallery spaces during this exhibition but they are welcome in the shop and cafe areas.

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CURATOR’S STATEMENT

“The idea of this exhibition is to make the invisible, visible.

The pieces I have selected show a range of people, all from ethnically diverse backgrounds. These are people we may pass every day but don’t consider their life, or their struggles. When I say struggles, I mean the burden of racism. Looking at the faces of the people featured, I can feel and relate to what they may be going through, or what they will go through.

Throughout the exhibition, my wish is that the viewer connects with the artwork, the person depicted, and tries to put themselves in their shoes and to question, ‘how would I be feeling, in that moment, with that colour skin?’.

I want the exhibition to reveal the type of burden people from the ethnically diverse community carry.

I would like a viewer from the ethnically diverse community to feel seen through these pieces. I would like them to be able to share their own pain through these artworks, without having to say anything.

I would like a white person viewing the pieces to feel understanding, to see the struggle through the other person’s eyes, and to grasp that racial trauma and transgenerational trauma burdens every one of the people shown within the exhibition.

I hope that each and every person viewing Captured Beauty also has an awareness of how resilient people from the ethnically diverse community are … or have to be. The people within these pieces are captured, yet beautiful, strong, yet overburdened at the same time. My question is, should it always be this way?”

Abi Hutchinson, Black Voices Cornwall – Dec 2021
Curator of Captured Beauty

 

Venue:

Newlyn Art Gallery

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