Lubaina Himid's Reclaiming of History: Aesthetics of Imperial Ideologies Lingering in the Museum

Earlier this week it was announced that Zanzibarian-British artist Lubaina Himid (1954-) would represent Britain at the 2026 Venice Biennale making her the second woman of colour to do so in the 131 years Britain has hosted a pavilion at the international event, (the first was Sonia Boyce in 2022). In 2017, Himid became the first woman of colour to win the UK's coveted Turner Prize for her work Naming the Money (2004). Although, prior to these achievements, Himid had seldom received adequate critical acknowledgement in the mainstream art press, even after she had entered the spaces of galleries and museums in the 1980s. The silence around her was, at times, deafening. Like many artists who have been ignored by popular art media and the contemporary canon it narrates with historical ink, Himid’s treatment can be understood by an analysis of how her work highlights not only the historical untruths told by imperialism, but also how many Western art institutions and the artworks they hold have functioned to perpetuate expansionist ideologies.

Figure 1: Naming the Money (2004)

Take, for example, Spiridione Roma’s 1778 painting, The East Offering its Riches to Britannia. In the title alone we see how art is being used to convey a specific narrative of imperialism, one that assures the colonised and subjugated ‘Other’ agreed to give their treasures to Britain and that they somehow benefitted from their servitude, and sometimes even wanted it, in order to assuage contemporary concerns and possible future critics. Given that The East Offering its Riches to Britannia was commissioned by the East India Company to commemorate the wealth and power it had brought to the British Empire and was originally displayed in the Revenue Room, located inside the Company’s head office in London, we can assume that viewers of the work were either Company employees or visiting government officials who would have not only shared the same imperial ideologies represented in the painting, but also the same pattern with which they would have viewed the work. 

Figure 2: The East Offering its Riches to Britannia (1778)

In her exploration of the colonial histories of art in Western museums, Alice Procter notes that the way we look at a picture (excluding portraits or images of subjects we are able to make eye contact with) is most often the same way we read text with speakers of languages written left to right, such as English or Spanish, tending to begin looking at an image on its left side and moving across to the right.1 This left-right axis is not taught but an unconscious intuition first embedded in one’s mind when learning to read and is not only true for speakers of languages written in this direction as research shows that those whose first acquired language isn’t written left to right, such as Arabic or Persian which are written right to left, show the same image reading direction as their first language.2 For the history of Western art, this directionality bias has been affecting the overall composition of images produced since roughly the fourteenth century. 

Following this lateral reading of The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, we begin with four putti, one of whom is holding a shield with the red and white Cross of St. George of the English flag. The putti, then, can be understood as an allegory for the Company both holding up and being protected by the British Empire. Below them sits a lion, the symbol of strength and nobility seen on the English coat of arms, and Old Father Thames, personification of the river Thames referencing London where most of the goods collected will be taken and traded. Britannia is the highest figure in the image and looks down on all others while she examines and collects the offerings of her subjects. Separating the two hemispheres of the work is an ocean on which a ship sails with the East India Company flag on its bow, narrating the British characters on the left navigating their way across the high seas to the characters on the right. The pearly white skin of Britannia is contrasted with that of the four figures representing India, China, the Americas and Persia who are looking up at her in awe while offering gifts of jewels and pearls (India), porcelain jars and tea (China), cotton (the Americas) and silk (Persia). Among these figures stands Mercury, the Roman God of commerce, trade and communication, who is looking down to the Native Americans waiting their turn to make their offering, pointing his staff towards the awaiting Britannia and directing them to kneel at her feet. Characteristic of art produced in the Enlightenment period, the figures representing Britain on the left are placed within the light while the figures on the right representing the colonised Other remain shrouded in shadows, conveying the belief that the Enlightened individuals of Britain were superior to the un-Enlightened, and uncivilised, Other.3 Only by surrendering their treasures to Britannia can they be brought out of the shadows and into the light of Enlightenment civilisation. 

The allegorical figures of India, China, the Americas and Persia are depicted not only to be offering their respective products as willing gifts, but as though they are forming a line waiting, and hoping, to trade with her, reflecting the narrative that imperial expansion was a peaceful process and those it subjugated consented to their colonisation for the mutual benefits it supposedly offered. Thus, the painting acts as the Company’s declaration of innocence to any accusations of violence undertaken on behalf of the British Empire’s expansion and imperial ideological beliefs while omitting the historical truth of both organisations’ brutality and cruelty to those it here depicts and others that were to come in the future. This erasure of historical truth is exactly what Himid confronts and challenges in her work.

Figure 3: Carrot Piece (1985)

The narrative that the oppressed Other chose to be subjugated is questioned by Himid in one of her early cut-out pieces, Carrot Piece (1985), wherein the artist references Sandwich Carrots! Dainty Sandwich Carrots, a 1796 image by British cartoonist and printmaker, James Gillray.4 In Gillray’s print, two figures stand at the corner of New Bond Street and Little Maddox Street in London’s Mayfair neighbourhood, an aristocratic man stands on the left and a middle-class woman on the right who is pushing a cart of carrots. As they walk, the man grips ahold of the woman’s skirt with one hand, forcing her to stay at his side, with his other hand plunged into his pants. His flushed face and knowing smile removes any ambiguity for what he might be doing as they walk. 

Figure 4: Sandwich Carrots! Dainty Sandwich Carrots (1796)

In Himid’s reconsideration of the cartoon, a white man on the left struggles to maintain his balance on a unicycle while holding a long stick (that extends rather phallic-like from his waist) with a carrot attached to the end that he dangles in front of a black woman he is attempting to lure. Both Gillray’s images and Himid’s reinterpretation reference the ‘carrot or the stick’ metaphor whereby a person is presented with the choice of doing what another demands of them, either without resistance, which will result in being rewarded with the carrot, or with resistance, which result in being punished with the stick. Either way, the person in question is forced to do what the other demands. The woman in Gillray’s image can choose between accepting the man’s assault and being rewarded with its swift end, or resist and risk being punished with the man’s rejection aggression and condemnation from a society with strict feminine sexuality expectations. Himid, however, applies the metaphor to the tokenisation of people of colour in Western institutions who, at the time, were subject to growing criticism of their established narratives and racial hierarchies and wanted to be seen as though they were dismantling these in both exhibition and education programs through gestures that amounted to, in Himid’s words, “being paronised … by silly games and pointless offers”.5 In this sense, the man can be read as an allegory for Britain’s cultural institutions luring people of colour in with the promise of being rewarded with the institution’s endorsement (its carrot), or risk being beaten down by its implied power and authority to determine what constitutes ‘art’ (its stick). The woman, already having all she needs in her hands, doesn’t need the institution’s help nor support and, so, she turns away. Unlike The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, it is Britannia who is here making an offering in the form of institutional approval, but Himid and her fellow artists recognise they are ‘being patronised’ by Britannia who merely wishes to collect the treasures of their modern Other for their own financial benefit and to reinforce their superiority and preferred narrative that the objects were gifted without coercion. 

At the same time, Carrot Piece can be read as a reference to the servitude to which Britain subjected its colonised Other, who were forced to choose between accepting their subjugation and being rewarded by not being hit with the stick, or resist and be hit with the stick. As viewers who are familiar with the historical truth of how Britannia acquired its riches from those it colonised will also understand, regardless of whether the carrot or the stick is chosen, the woman depicted will have to hand over the treasures she holds in an act that, if passive, will reflect the history of Britannia collecting objects with little care as to what it represents and for the explicit purpose of exploiting the power that comes from the ownership of the colonised Other’s cultural heritage, or, if resisted, will inevitably be rewritten into the preferred colonial narratives of voluntary offering and mutual benefit. The exploitation and servitude women have had to endure at the hands of men is highlighted in both Gillray’s and Himid’s images, although, while this history is frequently discussed in feminist circles, such discussions seldom extend beyond white, Western women to its ongoing effects for women of colour. In this way, Carrot Piece not only highlights the ways in which British institutions have used and abused artists of colour to reinforce their superiority and relevance along with how the West continues to erase the reality of being forced to choose between the carrot and the stick, but also mourns for those who were faced with a carrot that was merely another stick in disguise. 

Art historian Griselda Pollock reasons that themes of mourning are “inevitable” in Himid’s exploration of false colonial narratives “not only because of individual pain but as a result of a historical trauma of terrifying magnitude whose repercussions are manifest in contemporary societies of the African Diaspora”.6 By this she is, of course, referring to slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that the British Empire used first to acquire wealth and then as justification for imperial expansion in the century following its abolition. The prevalence of slavery in Britain and the financial gain it provided is far too well documented to be expunged from social memory, but the story of the individual enslaved was, and remains so, easy to erase due to the simple fact that the victor, or in this case the salver, is always the one doing to writing of history and can therefore choose who and what is included and, more importantly, who and what isn’t. Omitting the story of the individual served to depersonalise and dehumanise by taking away their identity and instead grouping them under a common title of ‘slave’, thus limiting the possibility of forming a connection and seeing them beyond their status as a commodity. 

Figure 5: Naming the Money (2004)

The dehumanisation and commodification of Africans is highlighted in Himid’s Naming the Money, wherein she does exactly that – she bestows a name and an identity upon an otherwise insentient object and, in doing so, she makes visible the links between national economics, colonialism and slavery. Consisting of up to 100 life-size cut-out figures, Naming the Money confronts the colonial truths of institutions by telling the stories of people of colour who have been subjugated as slaves, servants, immigrants and asylum seekers. Individualising and personalising each figure with occupations of ceramicists, herbalists, toy makers, dog trainers, drummers, viol de gamba players, dancers, shoemakers, map makers and painters, Himid subverts the reduction of subjugated and enslaved bodies to a statistic. In order to further individualise the figures, they are each given two names (first their name given at birth, their ‘African’ name, followed by their enslaved name) which is written along with their occupation in a five-line verse autobiography attached to their backs. Here, Himid gives each figure a voice and allows them to tell the audience who they are. Aware of the false narratives that surround the history of the salve trade and realities of British colonialism, the figures remain two-dimensional and their faces unidentifiable – they are not portraits of real people, they are theatrical imaginations with the intentional lack of historical record making it impossible for them to be any more than two-dimensional. This is solidified with the autobiographies being written on ripped-out pages of account books as invoices or receipts, thus reminding us, the audience, that enslaved bodies were not viewed as people, but as property with a monetary value, to be bought and sold as an owner wishes.  

Historically, museums have used their collections to uphold this dehumanisation largely because they were to become keepers of the objects Britannia acquired and were therefore incentivised to be complicit with imperial expansion. Naming the Money was an effective challenger to the role London’s Victoria & Albert Museum has played in colonial histories while it was displayed alongside artworks from the V&A collection in a 2007 exhibition, Uncomfortable Truths – The Shadow of Slave Trading on Contemporary Art and Design, that marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade.7 The exhibition aimed to bring attention to the British Empire’s legacy and discuss “the hidden, overlooked and even contentious histories that link some of the historic objects on permanent display to the slave trade of past centuries” and “how the lifestyle of the privileged classes was dependent on the suffering of slaves”.8 Himid was one of several contemporary artists from Africa, Europe and the United States who collectively staged this intervention into the V&A’s collection, although, Naming the Money pushed further, critiquing not only the false histories and imperialist ideologies that the V&A were complicit in, but also how the museum continues to benefit from these legacies through the soft power they extract from their collection. 

Figure 6: Naming the Money (2004). Installation view at V&A.

One of Himid’s figures in the V&A exhibition stands before a tapestry depicting the historic house, Stoke Edith. Originally built by Henry Lingen (1612-1662), a ship-money sheriff who profited greatly off the Royal Navy and their exploits, the house was eventually sold to Thomas Foley (c.1670-1737), an ironmaster who made guns, ships, chains, shackles and various other items that were essential to the success of British slave traders.9 The Foley family also owned another estate, Witley Court, and included the likes of Edward Foley (1676-1747), who was an assistant of the Royal African Company from 1704-1705, Thomas Foley (1673-1733), Commissioner of Trade and Plantations and a suite of other Parliamentarians who maintain their ownership of the property to this day.10 When Stoke Edith Manor was destroyed by fire in 1927, a large amount of its contents was also destroyed but some of the escaping occupants, including at least twelve servants, took many items with them as they fled. Among those items saved from the flames was the Edith Stoke tapestry which was made in the early 1700s, around the same time Edward Foley was working for the Royal African Company and helped transport of some 90,000-100,000 Africans.11 

Figure 7: Stoke Edith Hanging Tapestry (1710-1720) and details

The tapestry itself depicts the gardens at the rear of the main house and includes several images that relate to the British slave trade and imperialism including Chinese porcelain pots and guardian lions (where the British East India Company had recently set up a trading post), a peafowl (native to the Indian subcontinent) and a scarlet macaw (native to Central and South America). Importantly, on the left side of the tapestry, two men can be seen walking along with a black servant following in tow and if we read in the same left-to-right direction with which we read The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, the positioning of African as being in service is one of the first things seen followed by icons of people were subjects of Britannia. There are also references to the wealth other nations acquired through their own colonisation with tulips lining patches of lawn referencing the vast wealth of the Dutch colonial empire as well as the tulip flowers they spent a considerable amount of their wealth on.

Figure 8: Naming the Money (Nilla) installation in front of Stoke Edith tapestry

Figure 9: Naming the Money (Nilla) installation in front of Stoke Edith tapestry

By placing one of her cut-outs in front of this tapestry Himid is revealing not only how the house was built with wealth obtained through imperial expansion and the enslavement of Africans, but also that it and its residents were maintained by the ongoing servitude of African people while European’s leisurely stroll through the gardens and relax. The specific cut-out Himid chose for this tapestry, Nilla, further suggests that it is she who takes care of the garden with several flowers, including tulips, shown on her dress, almost creating a narrative where Nilla has been tending to the tulips in the garden but has stopped to tell the audience her story. The voice Himid gives to Nilla confirms this in her autobiography wherein she states: 

“Name is Nilla. They call me Jenny 

I used to grow herbs to cure the sick 

Now I grow flowers to please the rich 

But they are very beautiful”12

Artworks like Carrot Piece and Naming the Money work to reveal historical truths hidden by the British Empire in their quest to colonise the world. In addition to highlighting these hidden histories and untruths, Himid also works to reclaim imagery that has been taken by Europeans and appropriated for their own art, specifically that which is seen in modernist art. The most famous example of this is, of course, Pablo Picasso’s adaptation of African imagery to develop Cubism, although such pastiche was seen across modernism and post-modernism when the colonised Other, especially African and Polynesian, had been conquered by a Western imperial power who interpreted and framed their Other’s iconography as ‘primitive’ so as to remain in line with established narratives of savagery and uncivilised, before artists of the West further misappropriated imagery of the Other in order to interrogate Western knowledge systems and their relationship with Western history in the modern era. Thus, when Picasso described his appropriation of African art as a “form of mediation between artists and the unknown hostile forces that surrounded them”, he can be understood to be mediating between the Western artist and the unknown hostile forces of Africa and Polynesia by use of his European stereotyped knowledge system.13

In return for Picasso’s appropriation of African imagery, Himid appropriates his work, Two Women Running on the Beach (1922) in Freedom and Change (1984), as a means of both challenging and reversing modern artists’ assimilation of ‘primitive’ art while highlighting the historical canon’s double standards of who is allowed to be inspired by what, and if/how they are allowed to recycle or reuse what they find. Picasso emphasises the female figure’s sensuality and European-ness by exposing their pale-skinned breasts and dressing them in Greco-Roman togas, whereas Himid emphasises their freedom and control by depicting them as moving away from the male gaze.14 The consumption of the colonised Other and misappropriation of imagery to reinforce imperial ideologies is a distinctly European process with ongoing implications that reach far beyond the realm of art. While most commentary on Himid’s use of Picasso’s work focuses on the original Two Women painting, seldom discussed is the important history of Picasso having made an enlarged version of the work for the ballet production Le Train Bleu.15 This, I believe, is where the brilliance of Himid’s use of the work lies and only through an understanding of Picasso’s original painting along with how its meaning changed through its involvement in the ballet, can we understand the meaning of Freedom and Change. 

Figure 10: Freedom and Change (1984)

In Western theatre productions, the purpose of a stage cloth such as this is to indicate the show’s mood to the audience without directly contributing to the work’s narrative.16 In this context, we can understand that the image would convey a sense of relaxed fun which the ballet built upon with a witty portrayal of the early twentieth-century fad for sea-side leisure and tourism in order to examine the shallowness of life and love in modern times.17 Le Train Bleu ballet received its name from the first-class train that ran from Calais in the north of France to Cote d’Azur in the south and gained notoriety in the early twentieth-century for being the favoured method of luxury transportation for wealthy passengers travelling from Paris to the Mediterranean sea where they would holiday or continue on to Egypt or the French colonies in other parts of Africa.

Figure 11: Pablo Picasso, Le Train Bleu Stage Cloth (1924)

In The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, Dean MacCannell argues that the leisured tourist, such as those travelling on Le Train Bleu, can be located within a specific class by way of leisure in its modern form, as invented by middle and upper-class Europeans, being the antithesis to the limitations of the perpetual productivity of the lower class and the indentured labour of non-Europeans, but it is designated time which must still be filled – not with production but with consumption.18 For the leisured tourist of Le Train Bleu stopping at Cote d’Azur, this is consumption time that people of colour have historically been unable to structure freely, and for those continuing onto parts of Africa, this is consumption of the colonised Other through a gaze that is framed by imperialist fictions of the exotic and the primitive. Thus, the women painted by Picasso and dancers of Le Train Bleu are performing a certain leisure that the women Himid depicts have not historically had the cultural or economic capital to partake. By choosing this specific work, Himid is therefore subverting the European leisured tourist’s gaze of the African Other by showing them in a leisure activity denied to them by such a gaze and actions.

Curating the British pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale is Cameroonian-Swiss museum director Koyo Kouoh, and while it is yet to be known what work Himid will create, the appointment of these two artists to represent Great Britain on art's biggest global stage is an indication that change is taking place at all levels of institutionalised art and art history. Although, given that Himid is only the second woman of colour to be represented and Kouoh is the first African woman to curate the pavilion, the ways in which art has perpetuated and historicised imperialist ideologies is clearly lingering within these spaces. Only with time and continuous effort on the part of these institutions can such ideologies be corrected and the historical truth they conceal be revealed.

References

1. Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums & Why We Need to Talk About It, (London: Cassell, 2020), p.54.

2. Sobh Chahboun et al, “Reading and Writing Direction Effects on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Photographs,” in Laterality 22, no. 3 (2016): 313–39, doi:10.1080/1357650X.2016.1196214.

3. Procter, The Whole Picture, p.93.

4. Omar Kholeif, “Lubaina Himid: Do You Want an Easy Life?”, in Journal of Contemporary African Art, 54 (2024): 6-23.

5. Kadish Morris, "Lubaina Himid: The Tireless Flag Waver for Black Art and Thought", Frieze, 02 June, 2018, https://www.frieze.com/article/lubaina-himid-tireless-flag-waver-black-art-and-thought 

6. Giselda Pollock, “Revenge” in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 2020).

7. V&A, "Uncomfortable Truths – The shadow of slave trading on contemporary art and design: An exhibition marking the bicentenary of the outlawing of the British slave trade – part of a national initiative, ‘Remembering Slavery’", Media release, 2006, https://media.vam.ac.uk/media/documents/legacy_documents/press_release/32156_press_release.pdf

8. V&A, "Uncomfortable Truths”.

9. The History of Parliament: British Political, Social and Local History, FOLEY, Thomas II (c.1670-1737), of Russell Street, Westminster, and Stoke Edith, Herefs, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/foley-thomas-ii-1670-1737

A ship-money sheriff was responsible for collecting the taxes used by the British Monarchy to fund the Royal Navy.

10. Miranda Kaufmann, “English Heritage properties and the slave trade”, 2007, English Heritage, https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/research/slavery/

11. Kaufmann, “English Heritage properties and the slave trade”.

12. Dorothy Price, "'Dreaming Has a Share in History’: Biding Time in the Work of Lubaina Himid", Art History 44, no. 3 (2021): 650–75, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12586  

13. Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference”, in Beautiful Ugly, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 30-60.

14. Laura Castagnini, “Freedom and Change”, Tate, April 2018 (published), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/himid-freedom-and-change-t15264

15. Victoria and Albert Museum, “Stage Cloth”, V&A, 4 November, 2008 (published), https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O171462/stage-cloth-picasso/

16. Victoria and Albert Museum, “Stage Cloth”.

17. Library of Congress, "Le Train Bleu (ballet in 1 act)", LoC, https://www.loc.gov/collections/bronislava-nijinska/articles-and-essays/la-train-blue/

18. Griselda Pollock, Griselda Pollock on Gauguin (London: Thames and Hudson, 2022), originally published in Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, (United States: Schocken Books, 1976).

Figure 1: Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (2004). Plywood, acrylic, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Hollybush Gardens, and National Museums, Liverpool. Photo: Stuart Whipps.

Figure 2: Spyridon Romas, The East Offering its Riches to Britannia (1778). Oil on canvas, 228 x 305 cm. British Library, England.

Figure 3: Lubaina Himid, The Carrot Piece (1985). Acrylic paint on plywood, wood and cardboard, and string, 243 x 335 cm (dimensions variable). Tate, U.K.

Figure 4: James Gillray, Sandwich Carrots! Dainty Sandwich Carrots (1796). Etching in dark brown, with handcoloring, on cream wove paper, 35.3 × 24.7 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, U.S.A.

Figure 5: Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (2004). Installation view at ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–now. Art, Colonialism and Change’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2024). National Museums Liverpool, International Slavery Museum. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry.

Figure 6: Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (2004). Installation view at 'Uncomfortable Truths', Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2007). Image via Lubaina Himid, https://lubainahimid.com/portfolio/uncomfortable-truths/

Figure 7: Stoke Edith Hanging Tapestry (1710-1720) (and details). Embroidered linen canvas with silk and wool, and appliqué, 714 x 335 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London, U.K.

Figure 8: Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (2004) (Nilla detail). Installation view at 'Uncomfortable Truths', Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2007). Image via Lubaina Himid, https://lubainahimid.com/portfolio/uncomfortable-truths/

Figure 9: Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (2004) (Nilla detail). Installation view at 'Uncomfortable Truths', Victoria & Albert

Museum, London (2007). Image via Lubaina Himid, https://lubainahimid.com/portfolio/uncomfortable-truths/

Figure 10: Lubaina Himid, Freedom and Change (1984). Wood, textiles, cardboard, paint, graphite, coloured pencil, chalk and ink, 282.5 x 578.0 x 6 cm (dimensions variable). Tate, U.K.

Figure 11: Pablo Picasso, Le Train Bleu Stage Cloth (1924). Gouache on canvas, 1,000 x 1,100 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, U.K.