CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Profile: Pioneering artist Claudette Johnson
Weaving together emotions and intelligence, Claudette Johnson's drawings speak to the lived experience of black women in Britain
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
ONE of the most significant figurative artists working in Britain today, Claudette Johnson creates potent images with oil pastels, inks and charcoal on paper which, informed by purposeful radicalism, have an exquisite lightness of touch.
For Johnson, her works are an active part of making sense of life and countering negative legacies of colonialism. Her powerful output made her a key figure in the influential BLK Art Group and it continues to ignite debate about how how gender and race may be understood through art, now and in the future.
Born in Manchester in 1959 to Jamaican parents, hers were the first black family to live on their street. At primary school, she was the only pupil of Caribbean decent and lessons touching on slavery or Caribbean culture made her keenly aware of being “other.”
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For generations black women have shaped Britain’s activism, arts and public life despite exclusion and discrimination. ZITA HOLBOURNE pays tribute to these political trailblazers and cultural icons, whose courage continues to inspire
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On the 121st anniversary of communist Claudia Jones’s birth ROGER McKENZIE looks at political events that shaped her, and those she helped shape