The Thin Black Line and the Broad White One.
I went to a talk between Lubaina Himid and Paul Goodwin at the Whitechapel Gallery last week. They discussed three exhibitions she had worked with in the 1980s: Five Black Women at the Africa Centre (1983), Black Women Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre (1983-4) and The Thin Black Line at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1985). It was illuminating and more than a little depressing. One thing that got wedged in my head was how the exhibition at the ICA, deeply symbolic in a conduit between the big art stuff (ironically very small artworks by Richard Tuttle) and the …