Shade

Bolanle Tajudeen founded Black Blossoms in 2015 to showcase the work of contemporary artists of colour. 

In 2020, Bolanle launched the Black Blossoms School of Art and Culture, an initiative highlighting the art histories and creative practices of artists from historically marginalised backgrounds. As an alternative art school, Black Blossoms offers short educational courses including Art and Revolutionary China, Black British Art, The Black Image in London Galleries, and Curating Black Art.

Lou & Bolanle discuss her shift in focus from studying politics, to art at UAL where, as the Vice President of the Student Union she co-founded UAL So White to address the lack of diversity in teaching staff. At the time there were 1,300 white and 126 BAME staff.

Black Blossoms provides public programming for Art on the Underground and partners include The Photographer's Gallery and Tate. We also discuss the media backlash Bolanle received following her Art on the Underground public programme. We round up hearing about Flourish Black Blossoms forthcoming event at Tate inspired by The Unfinished Conversation display curated by Aicha Mehrez.

Shade Podcast is written, hosted and produced by Lou Mensah

Music Shaded generously composed by Brian Jackson

Thank you for listening and for supporting Shade - an independent art show highlighting the work of Black art practitioners via Patreon and Ko-fi

Shade Instagram

Shade website

Black Blossoms Flourish at Tate

Black Blossoms website

Black Blossoms Instagram

See you next time!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Associate Director Gagosian Gallery.

Péjú Oshin is the Associate Director of Gagosian Gallery and curator of Rites of Passage the exhibition featuring work by nineteen contemporary artists who share a history of migration.

Rites of Passage explores the idea of “liminal space,” a coinage of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957). It is structured in correspondence with liminality’s three stages: separation, transition, and return. Each of these phases addresses the act of movement, not only through individual experience, but also in the broader context of community. The exhibition examines the status of postcolonial Black identity, specifically the “triple consciousness” experienced by members of the African diaspora when encountering counterparts who identify with local majority populations. 

Péjú shares the personal and professional journey behind curating this exhibition, plus the impact and legacy of BLM 2020 on her previous role as Curator of Young People's Programmes at Tate and beyond. We round up exploring the visible public positioning of a curator and how the contemporary media landscape informs working practices.

Shade Podcast is written, hosted and produced by Lou Mensah

Music Shaded is composed by Brian Jackson

Thank you for listening and for supporting Shade, a Black independent art show via Patreon and Ko-fi

Shade Instagram

Shade website

Rites of Passage at Gagosian

Péjú Oshin Instagram

See you next time!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Portals features the voice of Cassi Namoda who shares her reflections based on her practice and work titled 'Worship at Bar Mundo' (2022).

View 'Worship at Bar Mundo' here whilst listening to Axel's sonic response throughout this episode.

Cassi Namoda is a painter whose work interweaves the personal with the historical. Born in Maputo and having lived in several different countries throughout her life, Namoda’s nomadic lifestyle and multicultural identity has long informed her work. The duality between past and present, colonialism and post-colonialism, Africa and Europe, spiritual traditions and a globalised world is a latent force in her most recent paintings.

Discover more of Cassi's work at Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Goodman Gallery, François Ghebaly Gallery and on Cassi's instagram here.

Interludes is a collaboration between Shade Podcast and Axel Kacoutié featuring six contemporary artists: Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Phoebe Boswell, Rahima Gambo, Nnena Kalu and Cassi Namoda.

Framed by the question "What does healing sound like?", these podcasts offer a visceral connection with the artists' work. In each episode we weave the artists' reflections through Axel's original soundscapes, as a collaborative exploration of their creative experience.

The aim is to soften our tendency to intellectualise artwork, and instead create a sonic texture that is more intimate in its connection with the artist.

Concept & Production by Lou Mensah

Created by Axel Kacoutié

Interludes is supported by Hauser & Wirth

Read more about this series in Hauser & Wirth Ursula Magazine

Additional support by Frieze Membership, the community that champions art. Frieze members enjoy articles from the leading voices shaping today’s art world, priority booking to Frieze fairs and unique perks along the way. Find out more on frieze.com/membership

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mandala features the sounds of the artist Nnena Kalu creating an untitled work and the voice of ActionSpace Associate Artist, Charlotte Hollinshead.

Nnena Kalu has created a vast body of sculptural and 2D artworks and developed a live, performative element to her practice. She is driven by an instinctive urge to build repeated marks and forms, creating intensely layered, visually impactful artworks with dense colours and compacted, flowing lines. Nnena has developed her artistic practice at the ActionSpace studio in Studio Voltaire since 1999.

ActionSpace is London’s leading development agency for learning disabled artists. All of their work is focused towards enabling learning disabled artists to have a professional career in the arts. 

View Nnena's work here whilst listening to Axel's sonic response throughout this episode.

Interludes is a collaboration between Shade Podcast and Axel Kacoutié featuring six contemporary artists: Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Phoebe Boswell, Rahima Gambo, Nnena Kalu and Cassi Namoda.

Framed by the question "What does healing sound like?", these podcasts offer a visceral connection with the artists' work. In each episode we weave the artists' reflections through Axel's original soundscapes, as a collaborative exploration of their creative experience.

The aim is to soften our tendency to intellectualise artwork, and instead create a sonic texture that is more intimate in its connection with the artist.

Concept & Production by Lou Mensah

Created by Axel Kacoutié

Interludes is supported by Hauser & Wirth

Read more about this series in Hauser & Wirth Ursula Magazine

Additional support by Frieze Membership, the community that champions art. Frieze members enjoy articles from the leading voices shaping today’s art world, priority booking to Frieze fairs and unique perks along the way. Find out more on frieze.com/membership

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Where the sun sleeps features the voice of photographer Ming Smith who shares her reflections based on her practice and work Circle of Life (Hakone, Japan 1985).

Ming Smith was the first female member to join Kamoinge, a collective of black photographers in New York in the 1960s, working to document black life. Smith would go on to be the first black woman photographer to be included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

Smith has often described her work as ‘celebrating the struggle, the survival and to find grace in it.’ Many of Smith’s subjects were well-known black cultural figures from Nina Simone, Grace Jones and Alice Coltrane: all from her neighbourhood. Smith has cited music as being a big influence in her work, saying 'these pieces are like the blues.’

View 'Circle of life' here whilst listening to Axel's sonic response throughout this episode.

Interludes is a collaboration between Shade Podcast and Axel Kacoutié featuring six contemporary artists: Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Phoebe Boswell, Rahima Gambo, Nnena Kalu and Cassi Namoda.

Framed by the question "What does healing sound like?", these podcasts offer a visceral connection with the artists' work. In each episode we weave the artists' reflections through Axel's original soundscapes, as a collaborative exploration of their creative experience.

The aim is to soften our tendency to intellectualise artwork, and instead create a sonic texture that is more intimate in its connection with the artist.

Concept & Production by Lou Mensah

Created by Axel Kacoutié

Interludes is supported by Hauser & Wirth

Read more about this series in Hauser & Wirth Ursula Magazine

Additional support by Frieze Membership, the community that champions art. Frieze members enjoy articles from the leading voices shaping today’s art world, priority booking to Frieze fairs and unique perks along the way. Find out more on frieze.com/membership

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dream Recurred features the voice of Amy Sherald who shares her reflections based on her practice and new work For love, and for country (2022).

'For love, and for country' features in 'The World We Make', Sherald's first solo show in Europe. In this new body of work, Sherald humanises the Black experience by depicting her subjects in both historically recognisable and everyday settings, at once immortalising them and reinserting them into the art historical canon.

View 'For love, and for country' here whilst listening to Axel's sonic response throughout this episode.

Interludes is a collaboration between Shade Podcast and Axel Kacoutié featuring six contemporary artists: Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Phoebe Boswell, Rahima Gambo, Nnena Kalu and Cassi Namoda.

Framed by the question "What does healing sound like?", these podcasts offer a visceral connection with the artists' work. In each episode we weave the artists' reflections through Axel's original soundscapes, as a collaborative exploration of their creative experience.

The aim is to soften our tendency to intellectualise artwork, and instead create a sonic texture that is more intimate in its connection with the artist.

Concept & Production by Lou Mensah

Created by Axel Kacoutié

Interludes is supported by Hauser & Wirth

Read more about this series in Hauser & Wirth Ursula Magazine

Additional support by Frieze Membership, the community that champions art. Frieze members enjoy articles from the leading voices shaping today’s art world, priority booking to Frieze fairs and unique perks along the way. Find out more on frieze.com/membership

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Forgetting Eden features the voice of Rahima Gambo who shares her reflections based on her practice and project Education is Forbidden and Tatsuniya.

Rahima’s deeply layered mixed media engagement is about the aftermath of conflict, the nature of memory and the echoes and consequences of colonial education in north eastern Nigeria.

Discover more of Rahima's work on her Instagram and her website.

Interludes is a collaboration between Shade Podcast and Axel Kacoutié featuring six contemporary artists: Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Phoebe Boswell, Rahima Gambo, Nnena Kalu and Cassi Namoda.

Framed by the question "What does healing sound like?", these podcasts offer a visceral connection with the artists' work. In each episode we weave the artists' reflections through Axel's original soundscapes, as a collaborative exploration of their creative experience.

The aim is to soften our tendency to intellectualise artwork, and instead create a sonic texture that is more intimate in its connection with the artist.

Concept & Production by Lou Mensah

Created by Axel Kacoutié

Interludes is supported by Hauser & Wirth

Read more about this series in Hauser & Wirth Ursula Magazine

Additional support by Frieze Membership, the community that champions art. Frieze members enjoy articles from the leading voices shaping today’s art world, priority booking to Frieze fairs and unique perks along the way. Find out more on frieze.com/membership

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Larry Achiampong is a British Ghanian, Jarman Award nominated artist. In 2020 he was awarded the Stanley Picker fellowship and in 2019 he received the Paul Hamlyn Artist award in recognition for his practice. Larry’s most recent solo exhibition Wayfinder showed this summer at the Turner Contemporary Gallery. He serves on the Board of Trustees at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and The Elephant Trust.

Join Larry & I in exploring the impact of race on arts education and access to the arts sector. 

We highlight the urgent need for change as set out in The Runnymede Trust and Freelands Foundation research into access into the visual arts for Black, Asian and ethnically diverse students in the UK. It’s the first research project of this scale in the UK. 

The project was launched in July 2022 with a ‘Call for Evidence inviting contributions from students, teachers, art educators, artists and the wider sector. 

Read about how the evidence will be implemented and contribute by submitting your evidence here.

The final report will be published in early 2023.

Guest Larry Achiampong

This podcast was produced and hosted by Lou Mensah

Editing Mae Li Evans

Music composed for Shade Podcast by Brian Jackson

The Runnymede Trust website

This episode was supported by Freelands Foundation

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Drexciya features the voice of Phoebe Boswell who shares her reflections based on her practice and project The Black Horizon Do We Muse on the Sky or Remember the Sea?

Discover more of Phoebe’s work on her Instagram and her website

This episode also features a performance by Jazz Tenor Saxophonist JD Allen who collaborated with Phoebe Boswell on The Black Horizon project. His work is also available on all music platforms.

Interludes is a collaboration between Shade Podcast and Axel Kacoutié featuring six contemporary artists: Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Phoebe Boswell, Rahima Gambo, Nnena Kalu and Cassi Namoda.

Framed by the question "What does healing sound like?", these podcasts offer a visceral connection with the artists' work. In each episode we weave the artists' reflections through Axel's original soundscapes, as a collaborative exploration of their creative experience.

The aim is to soften our tendency to intellectualise artwork, and instead create a sonic texture that is more intimate in its connection with the artist.

Concept & Production by Lou Mensah

Created by Axel Kacoutié

Interludes is supported by Hauser & Wirth

Read more about this series in Hauser & Wirth Ursula Magazine

Additional support by Frieze Membership, the community that champions art. Frieze members enjoy articles from the leading voices shaping today’s art world, priority booking to Frieze fairs and unique perks along the way. Find out more on frieze.com/membership

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Interludes is a collaboration between Shade Podcast and Axel Kacoutié featuring six contemporary artists: Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Phoebe Boswell, Rahima Gambo, Nnena Kalu and Cassi Namoda.

Framed by the question "What does healing sound like?", these podcasts offer a visceral connection with the artists' work. In each episode we weave the artists' reflections through Axel's original soundscapes, as a collaborative exploration of their creative experience.

Interludes opens an alternative space. The aim is to soften our tendency to intellectualise artwork, and instead create a sonic texture that is more intimate in its connection with the artist.

Concept & Production by Lou Mensah

Created by Axel Kacoutié

Voice Credits Rahima Gambo, Ming Smith, Phoebe Boswell

Interludes is supported by Hauser & Wirth

Read more about this series in Hauser & Wirth Ursula Magazine

Additional support by Frieze Membership, the community that champions art. Frieze members enjoy articles from the leading voices shaping today’s art world, priority booking to Frieze fairs and unique perks along the way. Find out more on frieze.com/membership

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.