Making Waves

This article proposes a rereading of the timeline of the British Black Arts Movement, and offers early work by the Pakistan-born British artist, writer, and editor Rasheed Araeen as possible starting points for reading the work of a new generation of artists who emerged in the early 1980s. Making Waves draws attention to a work by Araeen, For Oluwale, which commemorated the racist killing by police officers of David Oluwale, a Nigerian vagrant persecuted in Leeds, England, during the mid-1960s, leading to his death in 1969. While proposing a radical new timeline, the article also concedes that “beginnings are notoriously unstable things.”