Feature Image: Vanley Burke
When I started my MA in Fashion Futures at London College of Fashion, I felt the pull of my Caribbean roots, an urge to see how art, identity, migration, and history intersect in work made by UK-Caribbean diaspora creatives. In that search I discovered Transforming the Crown: African, Asian & Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966–1996, a book (and exhibition catalogue) that became a vital map. It shows over fifty artists who, between 1966 and 1996, created work in Britain that responds to the intertwined legacies of colonialism, diasporic migration, gender, race, and belonging.
I was excited by many works in Transforming the Crown Curated by Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd.. But I also noticed that for many of those artists, digital traces are thin: fewer images, fewer essays, fewer interviews accessible online. That absence in the archive is itself meaningful. It points to what’s been made visible and what’s been marginalised, what gets preserved, and what gets forgotten.
So, in this article, I want to revive that visibility. I’ll be sharing artworks, lives, contexts of UK-Caribbean (and wider diaspora) artists from Transforming the Crown, amplifying what I can find. I hope this will give a richer portrait of their practice and perhaps spark new routes of connection for those whose work still lingers in shadows.
Eugene Palmer: Index (1993)
A Black woman in a simple black dress stands beside a fallen statue. Its head has been severed, its classical body echoing the broken ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. Behind her, African masks hover like witnesses, their gaze piercing the frame. This is Eugene Palmer’s Index (1993), a painting that quietly upends the hierarchies of Western art history.
The woman is Palmer’s mother, positioned as a figure of quiet authority, standing beside the fractured relic of Europe’s “civilisation.” By juxtaposing her with both the toppled statue and the African masks, Palmer collapses timelines and geographies, forcing us to consider who is remembered, who is erased, and whose image is allowed to endure.
Palmer, born in Jamaica in 1955 and raised in Britain, often begins with the photograph but transforms it into something larger. In Index, his use of portraiture resists stereotypes while asking viewers to confront the power structures embedded in representation itself. The painting reads like a visual archive: personal history, colonial memory, and cultural symbolism colliding on a single canvas.
Vanley Burke: Boy with the Flag
A boy stands proudly beside his bike, a Union Jack fixed to the frame. His smile is wide, uncomplicated, yet the flag carries more than decoration, it’s a marker of identity, of the search for belonging within Britain.
This is Vanley Burke’s Boy with the Flag, photographed in Birmingham during the 1970s. Burke, often called the godfather of Black British photography, arrived from Jamaica in 1965 and began documenting Caribbean life in the UK from the inside. His images resist stereotypes, choosing instead to capture weddings, church services, neighbourhood streets, moments of everyday joy.
In this photograph, the flag is both playful and political. It flutters as part of a child’s world, yet it also gestures to the layered reality of growing up Black and Caribbean in Britain, where national pride and exclusion often collided.
Burke’s archive, spanning decades of life in Handsworth and beyond, continues to remind us that the ordinary is never just ordinary, it is history in the making.
Keith Piper: Untitled (1986)
In one of his rarely buzzed-about canvases, Keith Piper pins a portrait to the wall of memory and indifference Untitled (1986). Painted in acrylic on canvas, it doesn’t shout. It pores. The work fixes the stylised face of a priest-king from Ife, the Nigerian sculpture tradition, in close-up stare. Surrounding that central image are smaller photographic fragments, snippets of history, of past lives, of contested identities.
But Piper doesn’t leave the portrait alone. Scattered across the surface are smaller photographic fragments: Tim Page’s images of U.S. helicopters in Vietnam. The juxtaposition unsettles. A sacred relic of African civilisation gazes out, calm yet unyielding, while behind it hovers the machinery of modern war.
The composition is squared, bordered by black marks that frame the face. The priest-king seems to look past the chaos, past the airborne violence, directly at us. It’s not an easy stare. It asks what it means to inherit a fractured history African origins, Western interventions, diaspora identity and how to hold all of it within one frame.
Keith Piper, born 1960 of African-Caribbean heritage, grew up in Birmingham. He was a founding member of the BLK Art Group, pushing back against the erasure of Black British narrative in the 1980s.
Franklyn Rodgers: At Last (1991)
A man fully clothed bursts upward through cascading water. Franklyn Rodgers’ At Last (1991) stages a scene that feels both comic and charged: a theatrical surfacing, a refusal to stay submerged.
Rodgers, born in London in 1963, has built a practice that straddles portraiture, performance, and social commentary. His photographs often use wit, shadow, and carefully staged encounters to dismantle the clichés imposed on Black identity. He was part of the generation of Black British artists emerging in the 1980s and ’90s, pushing photography into a space of both art and activism.
In At Last, that activism takes the form of humour. Some viewers may see the image as a sly nod to the racist stereotype that Black people “cannot swim.” Rodgers flips this on its head, his subject rises from the water with exaggerated expression, turning prejudice into parody. The joke is sharp, but it carries weight: stereotypes are exposed, ridiculed, and drowned in their own absurdity.
At Last is more than a portrait; it is a performance of survival and self-possession. Water, so often symbolic of crossing, migration, and displacement in diasporic histories, becomes here a stage for emergence. Rodgers’ subject rises out of it, not washed away but powerfully, playfully seen.
Armet Francis: Kingston, Jamaica 1980
An older man leans into his hand, his dreadlocks unkempt, his beard a thick white halo. The portrait is stark, tender, and unsentimental. Armet Francis’ Kingston, Jamaica 1980 gives us a face etched with time, experience, and survival.
Francis, born in Jamaica in 1945 and later based in London, has long worked between the Caribbean and Britain, using his camera to build a visual record of diaspora lives. Here, the gaze is intimate rather than distant: no spectacle, no embellishment, just the quiet dignity of a man whose presence commands the frame.
The portrait resists stereotype by refusing both romanticism and caricature. Instead, it offers something rarer, the chance to encounter a single individual, marked by history yet wholly himself, in a Jamaica often mediated through clichés. Francis’ work reminds us that identity is always more than image, but sometimes a photograph can hold that depth in one expression, one gesture, one face.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Beloved (The Bride) (1865)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Beloved also known as The Bride was painted in 1865, an oil on canvas now housed at Tate Britain. The work is Rossetti’s lush illumination of the Song of Solomon, that biblical love poem where Solomon’s bride becomes an emblem of desire, beauty, and divine union.
At the centre stands the bride, unveiled before the viewer, her skin pale against the saturated reds and greens that surround her. Around her gather attendants of different ethnicities, their presence heightening the exoticism Rossetti was so intent on staging. The inclusion of a Black child in the foreground was, at the time, a radical insertion though one tied as much to Victorian fascination with “otherness” as to any gesture of equality.
Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite sensibility turns the biblical text into pageantry: the lush fabrics, the sensual colours, the heavy symbolism of unveiling. Yet behind the opulence lies the tension of the era between sacred and profane, empire and intimacy, possession and love.
The Beloved endures as both a devotional and a disruptive image: Solomon’s bride re-imagined in a Victorian register, carrying all the contradictions of beauty, desire, and the politics of representation.
Allan deSouza: Indian Aphorisms (1992–1994)
In Indian Aphorisms, Allan deSouza gives form to the restlessness of migration and the push and pull of leaving, arriving, and never quite settling. C-prints layered with silkscreened text sit on wood and plexiglass, surfaces that feel both solid and fragile. The image carries an American flag in the background, while across the surface run rips and their careful mending’s, scars that won’t disappear but are held together anyway.
DeSouza describes his migration as a kind of modern-day Columbus: travelling, relocating and the need to re-explain who he is, yet with each attempt to account for himself, he feels more estranged. “When did the truth stop being a virtue?” the work seems to ask. His words interrupt the images like static, a reminder that translation across cultures is always partial, always frayed.
The result is a portrait not of one place, but of dislocation itself. The flag, the rips, the stitched repairs, the aphorisms they hold the tension of being bottled up between histories, languages, and geographies. DeSouza turns that tension into art, revealing the uneasy beauty of living as both insider and stranger.
Sutapa Biswas: Synapse IV (1987–1992)
Sutapa Biswas’ Synapse IV is a black and white photograph that feels like a cross-current, personal memory, colonial history, and the body’s own interior circuits colliding in a single frame. Hand-printed, the work is part of a series where Biswas explored how images operate like synapses: firing connections between the intimate and the political, the seen and the unseen.
Born in India and raised in London from the age of four, Biswas studied Fine Art and Art History at the University of Leeds, where she worked with feminist art historian Griselda Pollock. Pollock later noted how Biswas’ practice demanded we rethink race and gender through works that were both conceptually rigorous and visually arresting. That mix academic theory and raw image-making runs through Synapse IV.
The photograph’s stark contrasts echo the tensions Biswas has traced across her career: belonging and estrangement, body and nation, visibility and erasure. Like a synapse, it is a point of contact, but also a reminder that every connection carries a gap, a distance charged with meaning.
Sunil Gupta: “Pretended” Family Relationships
Sunil Gupta’s series “Pretended” Family Relationships was born in defiance. In 1988, the Thatcher government’s Clause 28 declared that local authorities could not “promote homosexuality” or present same-sex partnerships as “pretended family relationships.” For artists who relied on council-funded venues, the law was a silencing act. For queer communities, it became a call to mobilise.
Gupta answered with photographs that weave together intimacy and protest. Each work pairs a portrait of an unnamed couple with a poem by his partner Stephen Dodd, alongside images taken at demonstrations against Clause 28 in London. The effect is layered: the tenderness of private love, the rage of collective action, the vulnerability of being made visible under threat.
The series insists that these were not “pretended” families, but real lives, real relationships, real communities. By juxtaposing domestic portraits with the imagery of street protest, Gupta made the personal political in a moment when both were under attack. His photographs are more than documents, they are refusals, asserting the right to love and to be seen.