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Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change review – the most radical show in the RA’s history | Art | The Guardian

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Royal Academy, London The latest institution to confront its colonial past, the RA does so to enthralling effect, using the art and its subjects – spanning 250 years, from Turner to Lubaina Himid – rather than the wall texts to shock and enlighten T he opening room stuns: a circle of magnificent 18th-century portraits hanging spotlit in a darkened rotunda. Ignatius Sancho, actor, writer, composer, the first man of African descent to vote in Britain, speech still quick upon his lips, sits for Thomas Gainsborough in Bath. A young man, half-smiling, but with care on his brow, poses for John Singleton Copley in London. Francis Barber, servant and cherished companion to Samuel Johnson, holds his beautiful head high in Joshua Reynolds’s Leicester Square studio. Barber will be Dr Johnson’s heir. Every sitter in every great painting is Black (including Kerry James Marshall’s contemporary imagining of Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved African American artist whose life and work are known only throug

The First Supper (2021-23), Tavares Strachan’s lifesize recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the Royal Academy’s courtyard, the parts all played by heroes of Black history. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/the Guardian View image in fullscreen The First Supper (2021-23), Tavares Strachan’s lifesize recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the Royal Academy’s courtyard, the parts all played by heroes of Black history. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/the Guardian Art This article is more than 2 years old Review Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change review – the most r

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