Henry Louis Gates Jr at the British Museum

Just over  a month ago a work colleague suddenly said, I have seen an event on the British Museum website that you'll be interested in for your blog. Imagine my surprise when the weblink showed an event called The Image of the Black in Western Art: the hidden history and its legacy, with a programme that included the Harvard professor, writer, educator, scholar and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. As the chair, British Museum trustee, playwright and author, Bonnie Greer said when introducing him, we don't do public intellectuals here in the UK. Also on the panel was the author Aminatta Forna and the film maker Isaac Julien. The final contributor was the the British academic David Bindman. 

What I had not realised, until I turned up, was that the event was in fact the celebration of the re-publication of a series books that are the collection of the images (paintings, sculptures photographs - all visual art forms) of people of African descent from ancient times through to the nineteenth century. When it is completed the volumes will cover 5,000 years and include 26,000 images.The re-publication of the books has been directed by Henry Louis Gates Jr, who runs the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Studies centre - part of Harvard University and edited by David Bindman, who is a art historian.  Listen to Henry Louis Gates Jr discuss the project on the BBC World Service's arts programme The Strand.

The project began in 1960s, with the original books published in the '70s by the Texan based art collector and human rights campaigner Dominque de Menil. The new books look magnificent, and are a whopping £60 each! Such tremendous research has gone into putting them together, they will be an amazing addition to any book collection. 

As you can just about see from the second photograph above, there was a massive clamour to buy the books with the queues up to four people deep and I saw a number of people who had purchased three of the books. So when people say that black folk don't buy books - do remember this photo. I decided not to buy that night, the truth is I could not get close enough to even browse, never mind touch one, but be assured that they are definitely on my wish list. 

The same team including the now retired David Bindman, are working on the 20th century collections of the series and these are going to be published over the next two to three years, they said on the night - but the Harvard University link below lists publication as this autumn. 

Henry Louis Gates Jr is a wonderful speaker. I know that he's a lecturer, and that the good ones know how to keep an audience engaged, but he was truly something else. I am so pleased to have seen him on this brief trip to London. The thing is we just don't have speakers/presenters with his kind of style in the UK. He wears his considerable knowledge lightly and you hardly realise that you are learning as he tells his stories in a light, positive and entertaining way. You did not have to be interested in art to be inspired by what he has achieved with project. 

He told of the history of the original art collection that started the books; his precarious experiences raising funds to get the book project started; and connected it to his upbringing in a way that certainly made the black people in the audience laugh with the shared recognition of growing-up in a white majority society. Perhaps most importantly, in a really easy to understand way, he explained the social, cultural and artistic importance of The Image of the Black in Western Art series.  It is that seeing the works together in this way give us the chance to reappraise how black people have been depicted, and we can now make links between works that are not obvious when they are apart, and as Aminatta put it, it lets us 'reverse the gaze'. One of the key points that he made was that in these editions of the books, the people who have written the essays would never have been considered as appropriate authors in the first editions. This means that in effect, we get to review the art and tell our own many stories about them. These books will be a great resource and inspiration for all, not just the academics and scholars. Start saving up now. 

The full list of the books in The Image of the Black in Western Art series