Join Peter Brathwaite on an extraordinary journey through representations of Black subjects in Western art, from medieval Europe through the present day.
 
“These mirror images with their uncanny resemblances traverse space and time, spotlighting the black lives that have been silenced by the canon of western art, while also inviting us to interrogate the present.” —Times (UK)
 
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Brathwaite has thoughtfully researched and reimagined more than one hundred artworks featuring portraits of Black sitters—all posted to social media with the caption “Rediscovering #blackportraiture through #gettymuseumchallenge.”
 
Rediscovering Black Portraiture collects more than fifty of Brathwaite’s most intriguing re-creations. Introduced by the author and framed by contributions from experts in art history and visual culture, this fascinating book offers a nuanced look at the complexities and challenges of building identity within the African diaspora and how such forces have informed Black portraits over time. Artworks featured include The Adoration of the Magi by Georges Trubert, Portrait of an Unknown Man by Jan Mostaert, Rice n Peas by Sonia Boyce, Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, and many more. This volume also invites readers behind the scenes, offering a glimpse of the elegant artifice of Brathwaite’s props, setup, and process.
 
An urgent and compelling exploration of embodiment, representation, and agency, Rediscovering Black Portraiture serves to remind us that Black subjects have been portrayed in art for nearly a millennium and that their stories demand to be told.

An exhibition of Brathwaite’s re-creations is on view at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in Bristol, UK from April 14 to September 3, 2023.

In the 1940s, the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education investigated directions for the modernization of the province in the post-war era of change. It was charged particularly with looking at rural Manitoba’s cultural, educational, and leadership opportunities in the wake of new technologies, dwindling populations, and altered political and social affiliations. The commission engaged Jim Giffen, then a young sociologist from the University of Toronto, to undertake a detailed field study of three rural Manitoba towns in this context.Giffen’s extensive study examined the towns of Carman, Elgin, and Rossburn, all significantly different in terms of their ethnic makeup and level of political and organizational sophistication. He remained in the province for a year and a half, at the end of which his report, an analysis of “education for leadership,” was considered “too revealing” for public release. It remained in the Ontario Legislative Library until it was retrieved, 50 years later, by well-known historian Gerald Friesen, who has written an extensive postscript to the report.As a snapshot of rural agricultural life in prairie Canada at a time of great change, the study is invaluable. Despite the differences in the three towns, they retain some common characteristics that define a particular socio-cultural view of the larger world. Giffen looks at characteristics such as leadership in the community, ethnic differences, hierarchy of roles, participation in organizations, and aims and activities of young people. Friesen’s postscript provides a wider context to this study, and an assessment of what these differences and commonalities meant to the province.