At a time of rising xenophobia and nativism, their work examines the meeting of different cultures, and their own right to belong.
THE H.M.T. EMPIRE Windrush was a ship that carried one of the first large groups of passengers from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom in 1948. But its name went on to become shorthand for an entire generation, roughly half a million people who emigrated out of Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean between the late 1940s and the early 1970s to the seat of a dying empire. This was a group that had been invited to Britain to rebuild the country after the Second World War. Many of them had served in Britain’s armed forces. And yet, once they’d outlived their purpose, the British government left them to fend for themselves. In 2017, during the premiership of Boris Johnson, it began to surface that the Home Office had wrongly classified some members of the Windrush generation, which led to the deportation of about 80 people. Others were denied access to work, health care and benefits.
The Windrush scandal spoke to dispossession in a literal sense, but it was also a symbolic erasure of the Caribbean community’s contribution to British cultural life in the latter part of the 20th century. Everything from the Notting Hill Carnival to Zadie Smith; reggae and calypso; new language and new fruits (soursop, custard apple) resulted from this postcolonial encounter, which, in the words of the British Sri Lankan activist A. Sivanandan, might be summarized as “we are here because you were there.”
Windrush is in one sense the ultimate symbol of an imposed dislocation, of homelessness, of people on a ship adrift on the waves of history. There are reminders all over Britain, like the renaming of a transit line in London to Windrush in 2024. It’s also an artistic movement. At a moment of rising xenophobia and nativism across the world, three artists — the painter Hurvin Anderson, 60, the multimedia artist Sonia Boyce, 63, and the sculptor Veronica Ryan, 69 — each have recently had shows in New York that examine the postwar meeting of Caribbean and British cultures, and their own individual right to belong. Their work, in oblique and direct ways, captures the strain of balancing multiple societies in one’s head — “I was essentially making paintings,” as Anderson has said, “of one place but actually thinking about another” — but also of bearing witness to the double vision that colonialism produced, that two-way traffic of looking and being looked at.