New Exhibition Features Contemporary Portraits Honoring Forgotten Black Abolitionists
Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum is spotlighting the men and women who fought to end slavery but received little attention from artists during their lifetimes
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In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published a memoir titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself.
Equiano had been abducted from an Igbo village in West Africa at age 11. In the memoir, he detailed how he had been sold into slavery in the West Indies and Virginia and eventually purchased his freedom. The Interesting Narrative became a bestseller and ignited international conversations about the horrors of slavery.
For such a prominent man, however, Equiano received little attention from artists during his lifetime. Only an engraving of Equiano’s likeness printed in the frontispiece of The Interesting Narrative remains. The original miniature portrait has been lost to history.
Omissions of Black abolitionists, resistance leaders and other prominent figures from the historical record are common. But for contemporary artists, omission can be an opportunity for creation.
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“I started off feeling sad and annoyed about the fact that these figures weren’t more widely known, and that quickly moved to excitement,” Joy Labinjo, a British-Nigerian artist, tells Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred.
Labinjo painted An 18th-Century Family, an imagined scene of Equiano with his family. Acquired by the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum in 2022, the artwork is now the centerpiece of “Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition,” an exhibition that explores the fight to end the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing struggle against racism and injustice.
The exhibition pairs historical paintings and objects with contemporary works. In particular, curators focused “on the testimony of individuals as a powerful tool of resistance—and as a way of helping others to recognize injustice,” museum director Luke Syson tells BBC News’ Katy Prickett.
Paired with Labinjo’s painting of Equiano is a collection of objects from throughout his life, including his will and inventory from 1797, his marriage certificate to Susannah Cullen and a set of Nigerian drums made in the early 20th century, offering a glimpse into the homeland from which he was torn.
“Rise Up” covers the years between 1750 and 1850—during which the British Empire trafficked more captive Africans than any other European power—with about 100 objects and artworks.
Another figure highlighted in the show is Charles Ignatius Sancho, who was born on a British slave ship around 1729. When he was a small child, Sancho was taken to England, where he learned to read and write. He later became a leading abolitionist and, as a property owner, one of the first known individuals of African descent to vote in a British election.
Sancho is the subject of a 1768 portrait by the English painter Thomas Gainsborough. It depicts the prominent Black abolitionist, composer and writer with a reverence usually reserved for white subjects.
However, that kind of artistic representation was rare at the time. In a series of portraits, the Haitian-born, Montreal-based artist François Cauvin infuses Haitian revolutionaries with new meanings. His 2009 portrait of Toussaint Louverture reworks previous racialized depictions of the leader, replacing his cockade hat with a guinea fowl, which is a symbol of resistance in Haiti.
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Even the unnamed individuals counted among the millions forced from their homes in Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas get their due at “Rise Up” through the work of Joscelyn Gardner, whose hand-colored lithographs show anonymous women’s heads from behind, combining elaborate hairstyles with wildflowers native to the Caribbean.
The exhibition also grapples with the fact that Richard Fitzwilliam, the benefactor of the museum, was the grandson of a merchant who profited from the slave trade. Jan van Meyer’s 1718 oil painting The Daughters of Sir Matthew Decker, Bart shows the daughters of the slave trader, who helped make the Fitzwilliam fortune, basking in domestic luxury.
“Reparative justice is more than an outward display,” associate curator Wanja Kimani tells STIRworld’s Rhea Mathur. “It takes time, resources and will to do the internal work, and temporary exhibitions are not deeply entrenched into the institution’s fabric.”
“Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition” is on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, from February 21 to June 1, 2025.
