‘The broader themes of black heroes and heroines of the struggle for equality and freedom, international politics and the theft of our culture over hundreds of years show a personal/general, general/political, political/personal spiral in our work’. So Lubaina Himid summarises the artistic and political philosophies undergirding not only her practice but also the practices of contemporary Blackwomen artists and their traditions of art-making across the African diaspora more generally. At the heart of Himid's and their bodies of work is an individual and collective determination to do justice to the ‘struggle for equality and freedom’ by dramatising the agency, artistry and authority rather than the victimisation and vulnerability of Black diasporic peoples. ‘The mid 80's saw the heroes and heroines, Bessie Smith, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Yaa Asantewa, followed by The Carrot Piece for the show at the ICA, then Restoring the Balance and Fishing in which black figures enacted the rituals of reclaiming lost artefacts, refusing oppression and looking for ancestors’, Himid declares. All too aware of the political and cultural minefields generated by memorialisations of white men as icons of racist hate in her Cut-Out Men series, however much she was ‘trying to laugh at them, to sneer, and to jibe, to expose them as liars and cheats’, Himid created her Heroes and Heroines series in 1984 in recognition of her realisation that ‘I have since decided that they are best left well alone, ignored’. Visualising Black to white male oppression in this series (Figures 14, 15, 18 and 19), Himid re-presents, re-creates and re-imagines the lives of African diasporic women and men, iconic and invisibilised, as they engage in ‘the rituals of reclaiming lost artefacts, refusing oppression and looking for ancestors’. Dramatically to the fore is Himid's vindication of the absent-presence and present-absence of missing genealogies of Black artistry and activism.

Working to right the wrongs presented by the stark reality that ‘[t]here are too few visual images of black women’ within a European-dominant art historical tradition, while she also refuses to lose sight of her condemnation of white men as ‘liars and cheats’, Himid created her mixed-media installation Freedom and Change (Figure 16) in 1984.