Providing a thematic overview of the multifarious work produced by Derek Boshier (b.1937) from the post-war period to the digital age, this fascinating publication reveals how Boshier’s deceptively playful imagery offers analytical commentaries on societal issues and the fragility and fragmentation of human identity. Among contemporaries such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips, Boshier was a central figure in the British Pop Art movement. Embracing Pop sensibilities, his early work juxtaposed figurative painting and imagery to call attention to nuclear anxieties and the growing consumerism of 1960s Britain. Yet this is just one aspect of Boshier's remarkable artistic journey, which has drawn in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, graphic design and printmaking. The book's broad sweep includes recent paintings and drawings created in America at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and features commentaries by artists, academics, curators and writers who explore how Boshier's ground-breaking activity interrogates truth and logic, fantasy and reality in the modern age. With contributions by James Cahill, Philip Colbert, Eddie Chambers, Susan Compo, Rachele Dini, Inga Fraser, Jann Haworth, Leslie Jones, Emily Langridge, Gregory Salter, Penny Slinger and John Stezaker.

World is Africa brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most part are identified with the African diaspora. None of the texts are available online and none have been available outside of the original publication in which they first appeared. The volume contains several new pieces of writing, including a consideration of the art world 'fetishization' of the 1980s, as the manifestation of a reluctance to accept the majority of Black British artists as valid individual practitioners, choosing instead to shackle them to exhibitions that took place three decades ago. Another new text re-examines the 'map paintings' of Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. The third introduces the little-known record sleeve illustrations of Charles White, the American artist who was the subject of a major retrospective in 2018 at major galleries across the US. Among the other new texts is a critical reflection on the patronage the Greater London Council extended to Black artists in 1980s London. World is Africa makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history, the field of African diaspora studies and African diaspora art history.

Black artists have been making major contributions to the British art scene for decades, since at least the mid-twentieth century. Sometimes these artists were regarded and embraced as practitioners of note. At other times they faced challenges of visibility - and in response they collaborated and made their own exhibitions and gallery spaces. In this book, Eddie Chambers tells the story of these artists from the 1950s onwards, including recent developments and successes. Black Artists in British Art makes a major contribution to British art history. Beginning with discussions of the pioneering generation of artists such as Ronald Moody, Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, Chambers candidly discusses the problems and progression of several generations, including contemporary artists such as Steve McQueen, Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare. Meticulously researched, this important book tells the fascinating story of practitioners who have frequently been overlooked in the dominant history of twentieth-century British art.

How did a distinct and powerful Black British identity emerge? In the 1950s, when many Caribbean migrants came to Britain, there was no such recognised entity as "Black Britain." Yet by the 1980s, the cultural landscape had radically changed, and a remarkable array of creative practices such as theatre, poetry, literature, music and the visual arts gave voice to striking new articulations of Black-British identity. This new book chronicles the extraordinary blend of social, political and cultural influences from the mid-1950s to late 1970s that gave rise to new heights of Black-British artistic expression in the 1980s. Eddie Chambers relates how and why during these decades "West Indians" became "Afro-Caribbeans," and how in turn "Afro-Caribbeans" became "Black-British" - and the centrality of the arts to this important narrative. The British Empire, migration, Rastafari, the Anti-Apartheid struggle, reggae music, dub poetry, the ascendance of the West Indies cricket team and the coming of Margaret Thatcher - all of these factors, and others, have had a part to play in the compelling story of how the African Diaspora transformed itself to give rise to Black Britain.

World is Africa brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most part are identified with the African diaspora. None of the texts are available online and none have been available outside of the original publication in which they first appeared. The volume contains several new pieces of writing, including a consideration of the art world 'fetishization' of the 1980s, as the manifestation of a reluctance to accept the majority of Black British artists as valid individual practitioners, choosing instead to shackle them to exhibitions that took place three decades ago. Another new text re-examines the 'map paintings' of Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. The third introduces the little-known record sleeve illustrations of Charles White, the American artist who was the subject of a major retrospective in 2018 at major galleries across the US. Among the other new texts is a critical reflection on the patronage the Greater London Council extended to Black artists in 1980s London. World is Africa makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history, the field of African diaspora studies and African diaspora art history.