Review of Rasheed Araeen: Art and Institutional Racism 

In 1984 Rasheed Araeen published Making Myself Visible. It was an important and indispensable collection of his writings to date, on subjects relating to his own art practices, his pioneering publishing of Black Phoenix, his exhibition reviews and his engagement or attempts at engagement with the Arts Council, as he sought financial and institutional support for his ambitions to produce what he saw as a more balanced, credible history of modern and contemporary art in Britain. Now, some four decades later, Araeen presents us with Art and Institutional Racism, which can in many ways be read as picking up from where Making Myself Visible left off.

It is a particularly readable collection of chapters of varying lengths, concerning themselves with post-Making Myself Visible institutional responses to visual arts activity, much of which is framed by Araeen as in equal measure drawing from (as in, appropriating), or resisting, his activism championing the telling of different stories of British art. The chapters include: ‘Eurocentrism, Academia and Modern Art’, ‘Art, Modernism and the Migration of Artists to the Western Metropolis’, ‘Black Artists in Britain’, ‘Postwar Immigrants in Britain and the Struggle for Equality’, ‘Children of the Immigrants and Black Art’ and ‘Tate, The Courtauld and History of Art’. In the book, Araeen freely admits that he is not an academic and, consequently, several of the book’s chapters have titles that in and of themselves unequivocally articulate the degree to which Araeen was dismissive of, and steadfastly unimpressed with, institutions such as the former Greater London Council (GLC) and its arts initiatives, and the Arts Council-sponsored Institute of International Visual Art (INIVA); see, for example, the decidedly unacademic chapter titles ‘The GLC 1982–86, and its Misguided View of Black People and Their Creativity’ and ‘Institute of International Visual Art (INIVA) and the Opportunism of Stuart Hall’.

Art and Institutional Racism begins with a roll call of those Araeen thanks for assisting him, supporting and inspiring him and facilitating exhibition opportunities over the decades. Such individuals, however, take up precious little space in the book. Instead, the volume concerns itself with Araeen’s engagements with those he ultimately regards as less inclined to be supportive, describing them as having ‘little intellectual ability to understand things, instead often displaying their ignorance, incompetence, complacency, evasiveness, deception, and above all, the arrogance of bureaucratic power.’ (p9) For the avoidance of doubt, Araeen goes on to refer to his encounters with ‘complete idiots, particularly those who were given jobs as part of cultural diversity programmes’. From beginning to end, Art and Institutional Racism ebbs and flows with Araeen’s characteristic knockabout which on occasion leaves the reader oscillating between reading sweeping statements – ‘Artists of today are appropriating and using past ideas cynically only for their own purposes, for their own personal ambitions and glories.’ (p153) – and reading other, less dismissive assertions, such as ‘Art is a cultural practice that defines and reflects upon the nature and the history of society we live in.’ (p149).

… One of the dominant frustrations with the book is its title’s reference to ‘institutional racism’. Popularised by William Macpherson in his 1999 report into the failings following the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the term broadly refers to the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. But institutional racism has left us with racism (in Araeen’s case, art establishment racism) that is now void of actual and nameable racists. It is certainly the case that Araeen does not accuse any of the people with whom he engages (or more accurately, crosses swords or locks horns with) of being racists; on the contrary, he seems quite pally with Nick and Debby, as he not infrequently calls them. These somewhat ambiguous relations lead to repeated games of cat and mouse – though it is never clear who might be the cat and who the mouse – in which Araeen tables his assertions and demands, only to be met by what he considers, at best, to be polite obfuscation or, at worst, wilful indifference... 

The above extracts are from a review by Eddie Chambers, in Art Monthly, October 2025: 34-35