I’m delighted to announce that Allison Young is the recipient of the 2016 HBA Travel Grant. She’ll be presenting her paper “The Image of the ‘Riot’ in Gavin Jantjes’ Political Prints” in the panel Afrotropes at the 2016 College Art Association Annual Conference in Washington D.C., to be held February 3–6.
As Allison notes in her application:
My paper considers a series of screen-prints made by the South African artist Gavin Jantjes in the late 1970s and 1980s, while he was living in exile in London after almost a decade in Hamburg. Janjtes’s work was informed by his entry into a local artistic milieu, and reflects visually the influence of British Pop artists such as Joe Tilson and Richard Hamilton, while also sharing with these artists an interest in the media’s role in steering public discourse on social and political topics. My paper focuses on his use of British newspaper clippings documenting the 1976 Soweto Uprisings in South Africa, when militarized police opened fire during a student protest. I argue that meaning may also be read in light of similar events escalating concurrently in Britain, most notably in the aftermath of riots at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival. . .
[The paper] highlights the ways in which foreign-born and minority artists are central, not peripheral, to the history and evolution of British art in the twentieth century. Jantjes’s presence in the London art scene in the 1980s, as an artist, writer and curator, had an undeniable impact not only on the development of his own practice but also on the British organizations with which he was involved, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, where he was a key consultant in forging the Council’s policy on cultural diversity, and Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts).
Congratulations, Allison!
Kim Rhodes