About this program
Michael Ohajuru explores how Black figures, once positioned as exotic, subservient, or symbolic, have moved toward the center of artistic representation—sometimes through shifts in artistic intention, sometimes through reinterpretation by contemporary audiences. Through this lens, Ohajuru questions historical silences and considers how the Black presence in art speaks to the evolving relationship between Black and white identities in the Western world.
Generous support for this program has been provided by the Norma Lytton Fund for Docent Education, established in memory of Norma Lytton by her family. Lytton was an active docent at the YCBA for more than twenty years and subsequently spent a decade engaged in research for the museum’s Department of Paintings and Sculpture.
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About Michael I. Ohajuru
Michael Ohajuru is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He blogs, writes, and speaks regularly on identifying, understanding, and interpreting the Black African presence in Renaissance art. He is founder of the Image of the Black in London Galleries, a series of gallery tours that highlight the overt and covert Black presences to be found in the national art collections of London. Ohajuru is the project director of the John Blanke Project, a contemporary art and archive project celebrating John Blanke, the Black trumpeter to the Tudor courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. He is also a founding member of the Black Presence in British Portraiture network, managing their podcast The BP2 Podcast.
Top image
From left to right: Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man (detail), ca. 1758, black limestone on a yellow marble socle, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection; Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington and Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas (detail), 1782, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection; Joanna Mary Wells (née Boyce), Fanny Eaton (née Antwistle or Entwistle) (detail), 1861, oil on paper laid to linen, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund; and Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jacob Morland of Capplethwaite (detail), 2017, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, purchased with a gift from Mary and Sean Kelly in honor of Courtney J. Martin and with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and Friends of British Art Fund. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York.
