Reframing Blackness

A sparkling debut. Bold, eloquent, personal and clear-eyed, Alayo Akinkugbe is a major new voice in writing about art, museums and culture. Reframing Blackness shows us how addressing absences and erasures can be about so much more than just filling the gaps. This book is a manifesto, a manual and a toolkit all at once, focused on the urgent tasks of reimagining the canon, transforming the curriculum, and bringing art history into the 21st century. It will shift your frames of reference, expand your canvas, and give you hope for the future — changing how you look at art while also making you look again at your ways of seeing

A sparkling debut. Bold, eloquent, personal and clear-eyed, Alayo Akinkugbe is a major new voice in writing about art, museums and culture. Reframing Blackness shows us how addressing absences and erasures can be about so much more than just filling the gaps. This book is a manifesto, a manual and a toolkit all at once, focused on the urgent tasks of reimagining the canon, transforming the curriculum, and bringing art history into the 21st century. It will shift your frames of reference, expand your canvas, and give you hope for the future — changing how you look at art while also making you look again at your ways of seeing

Reframing Blackness is a testament to the necessity and vital importance of taking an active role in not only curating knowledge but challenging systems of knowing that have shaped our world view thus far.

Alayo Akinkugbe illustrates exactly how structural education should never wholly substitute the learning that we must continue to do into adulthood. To explore a history of Black communities across centuries of art is a love letter to the practice, a gift of knowledge and an ode to those who’s creative expressions give us much to be inspired by today.

To curate knowledge, is to understand and know ourselves better in a world we inherited, and a world that we contribute to in our short time here

By engaging in dialogue with the curators of recent pivotal exhibitions, Akinkugbe demonstrates a shared commitment to uncovering what has been overlooked – and a commitment to deepening the discourse around blackness ... The book raises key questions that black cultural producers have grappled with in the UK since the 1960s ... Akinkugbe guides us closer to a vision that does not require black people to reinsert ourselves, but insists on our resolute presence – both then and now.

If reading Gombrich left you with questions, well, these are many of the answers. A fearless, timely evisceration of so much of the Art History that we have taken for granted, and a rigorous and deeply compelling alternative way of seeing is proffered in its place. Mandatory reading.

" [ Reframing Blackness ] fills in gaping holes in institutional education, and contemporary art galleries, I wish I had a resource like this when I was growing up, but it's equally as impactful in my adulthood."

Alayo Akinkugbe graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in History of Art in 2021 and graduated with an MA in Curating the Art Museum from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2023. She runs the Instagram platform @ABlackHistoryofArt, which highlights Black artists, sitters, curators and thinkers from art history and the present day; and hosts the podcast A Shared Gaze. Alayo is a contributing editor and writes the column ‘Black Gazes’ for AnOther Magazine. She was awarded a curatorial research grant by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for the exhibition Entangled Pasts: Art Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Alayo was on the advisory panel and contributed to the book African Artists: From 1882 to Now, published by Phaidon in 2021, and has written for publications including Dazed, Tate Etc. and The World of Interiors. Reframing Blackness is her first book.