“‘Back to Black’ is a strident curatorial project bringing work by 47 artists, film-makers and photographers to interact over two gallery floors. It is an unusual partnership, combining those from the US, Britain and Jamaica, although artists that originated in various other Caribbean countries also take part. Collected together, its formally unorthodox display transformed the Whitechapel with a rich mixture of film and video, sculpture, print, text and image, photography and painting. An accompanying plush catalogue with gold-leaf lettering on an alluring black cover holds a compelling, imaginative essay by Powell prefacing two other curatorial commentaries, and six shorter essays by critics and historians from home and abroad. . . .” Leon Wainwright, exhibition review of Back to Black: Art, Cinema, & the Racial Imaginary, Third Text, 13 February 2006.
Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary. With David A. Bailey and Petrine Archer-Straw. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2005.
