British art institutions responded to the Black Lives Matter movement with “kneejerk” and “stopgap” solutions. So says the artist Gavin Jantjes, a South African artist who became a big player in the British black art movement of the 1980s.
Jantjes told The Guardian that, since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, museums and galleries have rushed to buy his work to fill perceived gaps in their collections. “Institutions would come to me and say, ‘Do you have a work from the 1970s that we can buy?’ When I was making those works in the Seventies nobody wanted to look at them — and the things I’m making now nobody wants to look at. It’s like the rinse cycle of a washing machine, it doesn’t
