Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025

This major group exhibition and events programme, curated by Lubaina Himid, marks 40 years since “The Thin Black Line”, the groundbreaking 1985 ICA show of young Black and Asian women artists.

Works by all original artists – Brenda Agard, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Jennifer Comrie, Himid, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, Marlene Smith and Maud Sulter – are shown together for the first time since 1985. Looking forward as well as back, the exhibition includes new commissions alongside works made over the past four decades. A vibrant programme of film screenings, talks, music and live performances extends beyond the gallery, realising Himid’s original vision for a multi-disciplinary Black arts festival across the ICA’s exhibition, cinema and live spaces.

In the early 1980s, Himid curates three exhibitions of young Black and Asian women artists that place their practices at the centre of debates in the British art world: “Five Black Women”, Africa Centre (1983), “Black Woman Time Now”, Battersea Arts Centre (1983–84), and “The Thin Black Line”, ICA (1985–86). Emerging within the wider British Black Arts Movement, these landmark shows foreground female artists and explore intersections of race and gender. Now, 40 years on, “Connecting Thin Black Lines” revisits and reinterprets these practices for today.