Back in the spring of 1988, troubled by the glaring absence of meaningful critique for Black women's art, fellow artist Sutapa Biswas and I wrote, ‘Will the Blackwoman Art Critic Please Stand Up?’ Published in Spare Rib, the article was a call for critical discussion of our work beyond the prevailing ‘angry black voices’ narrative. Thirty years later, the scarcity of published material persists. I am therefore excited at the arrival of this volume, eagerly anticipating the publication of more critical writing and honoured to be writing the foreword to what I am sure will become a landmark reference text for current and future artists and scholars.

Inside the Invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid reminds me that the vile trade in slaves, the racism it cultivated, fashioned and exported, its effects and consequences are very much a twenty-first-century concern. Race hovers like a spectre over our world. Conversations about what it is to be human, across the widest spectrum of artistic forms, take place in its shadow. Overwhelmingly it is artists of colour who wrestle to make conversations informed by race resonate. How to make art of sufficient urgency to hasten change with intensities and complexities fit for poetic purpose?

One of the many things that I love about Lubaina Himid's work is its restlessness. Her painting can be found on unstretched canvases, cut-outs, piano parts, bedlinen and spoons, in drawers, banjo cases and soup tureens. She paints on to and into my newspaper; on grand and miniature scales; as individual, installation and multi-part series; in galleries, museums, hospitals, grand houses and lighthouses. This restlessness is embodied by hundreds of works completed over four decades and yet to be fully catalogued, let alone discussed.

Inside the Invisible is the first book-length attempt to consider her practice. Occupied as I am with abolition both from a twenty-first-century vantage point and in a twenty-first-century form, I find myself returning to various of her works repeatedly. Lately, for example, I have been baffled and mesmerised by her Le Rodeur series, discussed at length in Chapter 13.