Twelve emerging and mid-career artists with an extensive range of practices have been selected as the second cohort of 20/20: a national commissioning and network programme directly investing in the careers of a new generation of ethnically minoritized and diverse artists.
20/20 was launched in November 2021 by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, working in partnership with 20 UK public collections, museums and galleries. The project has been generously supported by a £300,000 grant from Freelands Foundation, a £300,000 grant from Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants Programme and funding from UAL.
The project was conceived in response to urgent calls for action within arts and culture in the wake of Black Lives Matter, as social inequities and racial injustices continued to be amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The selected artists work across a diverse range of media, traversing painting, print, photography, filmmaking, animation, drawing, ceramics, and sculpture. They will undertake 15-month paid residencies hosted by partner museums, galleries, and art collections, and participate in a peer support network, to develop their artistic practice. Each residency will lead to the production of a commissioned artwork that will enter the partner’s permanent collection.
The first cohort of 8 artists was announced in September 2021, and their residencies are currently underway, pairing a total of 20 artists with 20 UK collections and resulting in 20 new permanent acquisitions over the life of the project.
Professor susan pui san lok, 20/20 Project Director and Director of the Decolonising Arts Institute said, “We are thrilled to welcome the second cohort of artists to 20/20. This is an exciting phase in the 20/20 project – our first eight residencies are already in full swing, and it’s been wonderful to support the deepening development of ideas and relationships. We are looking forward to starting journeys with our second cohort of artists, as they delve into collections and help to generate richer understandings of the histories and contributions of overlooked objects and artists in their midst.”
The artists & their collection partners
Jessica Ashman & Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
Jessica Ashman is a London-based artist working in animation, music, performance, and installation. A graduate of the Royal College of Art in Animation, Ashman combines textured animation with film projection, painting, and soundscapes, creating abstract narratives that explore her Jamaican diasporic heritage, Black radical feminist theory and science fiction.
Instagram: @Jessica_a_ashman
Cora Seghal Cuthbert & The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum
Cora Sehgal Cuthbert’s work explores the connections between the personal, the cultural, and a universal spirituality/humanity. Through this, Cora aims to expand her own worldview, as well as her audiences’, to encourage the sharing of stories, and to encourage the recognition of the beauty and love within our own everyday lives.
Instagram: @coracuthbert
Sonya Dyer & The Box
Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London and is a Somerset House Studios Resident. Dyer’s practice explores where the centre is located within fictional narratives of the future. She was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021 and is an alum of the Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program.
Instagram: @mssonyadyer
Billy Dosanjh & Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Billy Dosanjh works in film and photography. Much of his work is set in the de-industrialised factory towns of the Black Country, a harsh romanticised world where thousands of manual labourers were invited in the 1960s. He uses mise-en-scene techniques, archive, and text to explore the threshold experiences of these newcomers.
Instagram: @billster187
Adham Faramawy & Kettle’s Yard
Adham Faramawy works across media including moving image, sculptural installation, print, painting and wall-based works, engaging concerns with materiality, touch, and toxic embodiment to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities.
Instagram: @adham_faramawy
Holly Graham & Manchester Art Gallery
Holly Graham is a London-based artist whose work looks at ways in which memory and narrative shape collective histories. Holly is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, and Co-Founder of Cypher BILLBOARD, London.
Instagram: @hollycagraham
Curtis Holder & Leeds Art Gallery
Curtis Holder is a London-based artist who works primarily in coloured pencil to create large-scale portraits and figurative works on paper. In 2020, Holder won Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year and his work is held in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Soho House and the National Theatre, where he became the first ever artist in residence in 2022.
Instagram: @curtisartist
Sarah Maple & Bradford Museums and Galleries
Sarah Maple is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist known for bold artworks that challenge notions of identity, religion and feminism. Much of Maple’s inspiration originates from her mixed religious and cultural upbringing as a British-Punjabi. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University and has exhibited her work internationally.
Instagram: @sarahmapleart
Karen McLean & Walker Art Gallery
Karen McLean is a British Trinidadian artist. She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work merges historical narrative, memories, material, and mythology to question the role of the artefact, encouraging audiences to create new interpretations. Her practice asks the public to face the ongoing, and layered, colonialist traumas and their legacies.
Instagram: @karenmclean_art
Christopher Samuel & Birmingham Museums Trust
Christopher Samuel is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in identity and disability politics, often echoing the many facets of his own lived experience. Seeking to interrogate his personal understanding of identity as a disabled person impacted by inequality and marginalisation, Christopher responds with urgency, humour, and poetic subversiveness within his work. This approach makes his work accessible to a wider audience, allowing others to identify and relate to a wider spectrum of human experience.
Instagram: @christophersamuel_
Zoë Tumika & Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie is an artist from Glasgow, Scotland. They work predominantly with clay and make ceramics using hand-building techniques as well as wheel throwing. They also make using lettering, drawing and video. Informed by the politics Black Radicalism, they employ narrative-building and dismantling, listening and questioning, to consider alternative understandings and activate further possibilities as a means to liberation.
Instagram: @ztumika
Bindi Vora & Ulster Museum, National Museums, NI
Bindi Vora is a British-Indian photographic artist, associate lecturer in photography at UAL London College of Communication, and Curator at Autograph, London. Bindi is interested in how ideas of resistance and resilience are influenced by our everyday surroundings often using collage, linguistics, analogue processes, and found photography within her practice. In 2023 she launched her first major publication, Mountain of Salt, published by Perimeter Books.
Instagram: @bindi_vora
