Invited by the Getty Museum Challenge – which involved using household items to re-enact famous paintings on social media during Covid-19 shutdowns – famed British opera singer Peter Brathwaite began researching more than 100 artwork featuring black sitters. The works, presented in Rediscover the black portrait where they are recreated by Brathwaite, span from antiquity to the present day, including his own reconfigurations of key pieces such as The Adoration of the Magi (1480-90) by Georges Trubert, Black Charley, Norwich (circa 1823) by John Dempsey and Rice and peas (1982) by Sonia Boyce.
“Scouring social media, my feed was inundated with people who had taken up the challenge, recreating their favorite works of art using everyday objects found at home. The submissions revealed the depressing truth that most of the so-called great works of art we choose to present and celebrate do not tell the stories of people of color – the global majority,” Brathwaite writes in the introduction.
The post provides insight into the props and processes behind the works, conveying the humor and joy of using what you have on hand at home, Brathwaite says. The discarded birthday bunting was, for example, “a present in the reenactment of the Virgin of Guadalupe (anonymous, 1745) and does a lot of legwork for me in this recreation”.
The staging of Paston’s Treasure by an unknown Dutch artist (1670s) required the most preparation and staging, Brathwaite reveals. “I spent hours running around the house and scouring the attic to find the items needed for my interpretation of this iconic banquet scene. There’s a really satisfying process of doing the research, finding the props, building the scenes, going into what I think of as a performance, and then the liminal post-performance bit of taking the costume off and putting it all back in again!I draw from my performance experience throughout.
Prior to postgraduate training in opera at the Royal College of Music in London, Brathwaite graduated in fine arts and philosophy from Newcastle University. Studying the work of American artist Mike Kelley was a turning point, he says. “His work of found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblages, performances and videos profoundly influenced the work I was producing at the time. I definitely feel his influence in the work I do now; my stagings of portraits consist in undoing ritual and tradition.
But her hugely popular hobby project isn’t just about dressing up. The book arguably recovers black history and art. “I’m reclaiming the narrative on my own terms in hopes that these marginalized black lives can be made visible or seen again,” Brathwaite says. “Much of this work is about what it means to build identity in the African and Caribbean diaspora, particularly when in many cases there are only fragments.”
by Sonia Boyce Rice and peas (1982) and Brathwaite’s recreation © Sonia Boyce/ARS, NY; DACS, London; Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery; Pictured: Denise Swanson. Photo: Sam Baldock © Peter Brathwaite
Indeed, the project and publication have uncovered key aspects of his Barbadian heritage. “It allowed me to process a lot of what I already knew but got overwhelmed or pushed aside for fear of not fitting in.” There are recurring motifs and accessories that carry weight, such as the hi stick, a Barbadian kitchen utensil, and the heirloom patchwork quilts made by her grandmother.
“These props allowed me to develop a language that speaks to the discrete parts of my own mixed Barbadian-British identity and are useful pathways to the discrete stories I encountered throughout this project. These are traffic signs. They ask you to look again.
Brathwaite also explains how he reinvented two recognizable and important works, the work of Edouard Manet Olympia (1863) and Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of former US President Barack Obama (2018). “My staging of Manet Olympia reframes the original artwork to focus only on Laure, the African or Caribbean woman whose pink dress, white collar and madras headdress – a typical feature of dress in Dominica, Saint Lucia and many other places Caribbean islands – allude to Afro-European identity and the mixture of cultures imbued with symbolic power. In my recreation, I capture family history documents that speak to the dark historical ties that define my own mixed race,” he says. “Obama’s re-staging was particularly interesting because Wiley has already done the work of centering his subject. I could simply wallow in the joy of inhabiting the role, albeit seated in a chair perched precariously on a makeshift brick platform, and against the backdrop of exfoliating shower puffs.
Brathwaite’s last play, The young catechist (1827) by Henry Meyer, was commissioned by the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in the UK, for his Rediscover the black portrait exhibition (until September 3).
Finally, he notes the stimulating aspects of the project. “At first, the most challenging aspect of the job was how to recreate certain portraits without perpetuating the racialized trauma of many of the original images. Each new staging is an act of confronting the painful legacies of slavery and colonialism, in search of transformative layers of healing and justice. I do this by sharing my own personal story. The question of the black presence in Western visual culture is still relevant. “The work is about the conversations we have now. What assumptions do we make? It’s about what we see when we look at ourselves.
• Rediscover the black portrait, Peter Brathwaite, Getty Publications, 168 pages, £35 (hb)
