Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025

24 Jun-7 Sep 2025

Overview

This major group exhibition and event programme curated by Lubaina Himid celebrates 40 years since The Thin Black Line, the groundbreaking group show of young Black and Asian women artists at the ICA in 1985.

Works by all of the original artists – Brenda Agard, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Jennifer Comrie, Himid, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, Marlene Smith and Maud Sulter – will be shown together for the first time since 1985. Looking forward as much as back, the exhibition features new commissions as well as artworks made over the past four decades. Extending beyond the gallery space, a rich programme of film screenings, talks, music and live performances brings to life Himid’s original ambition for a multi-disciplinary Black arts festival across the ICA’s exhibition, cinema and live spaces.

In the early 1980s Himid curated three exhibitions of young Black and Asian women artists, positioning their practices at the fore of debates in the British art world: Five Black Women, Africa Centre (1983), Black Woman Time Now, Battersea Arts Centre (1983 – 84), The Thin Black Line, ICA (1985 c86). Developing within the wider discourse surrounding the British Black Arts Movement, these landmark exhibitions platformed female artists, highlighting the intersections between race and gender. Now, 40 years since the original presentation at the same venue, Connecting Thin Black Lines seeks to expand contemporary interpretations and conversations around the practices of these eleven artists today.