issue-16-editorial British Art Studies June 2020 British Art Studies Issue 16, published 30 June 2020 Cover image: Bill Brandt, Family Supper (recto), 1937, printed ca. 1943, photographic print.. Digital image courtesy of Bill Brandt and the Bill Brandt Archive Ltd. Photography by Richard Caspole and Robert Hixon. PDF generated on 26 February 2021 Note: British Art Studies is a digital publication and intended to be experienced online and referenced digitally. PDFs are provided for ease of reading offline. Please do not reference the PDF in academic citations: we recommend the use of DOIs (digital object identifiers) provided within the online article. These unique alphanumeric strings identify content and provide a persistent link to a location on the internet. A DOI is guaranteed never to change, so you can use it to link permanently to electronic documents with confidence. Published by: Paul Mellon Centre 16 Bedford Square London, WC1B 3JA https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk In partnership with: Yale Center for British Art 1080 Chapel Street New Haven, Connecticut https://britishart.yale.edu ISSN: 2058-5462 DOI: 10.17658/issn.2058-5462 URL: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk Editorial team: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/about/editorial-team Advisory board: https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/about/advisory-board Produced in the United Kingdom. A joint publication by Contents Editorial, BAS Editorial Group Editorial BAS Editorial Group Authors Cite as BAS Editorial Group, "Editorial", British Art Studies, Issue 16, https://dx.doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-16/editorial At British Art Studies, we know from our work to date how thoroughly entangled histories of British art are with the legacies of colonial violence, oppression, slavery, and systemic racism. These histories manifest themselves variously in artworks, art-historical writing, museum displays, and other forms of heritage conservation. Acknowledging the ways that British histories and cultural production have been complicit in anti- Blackness, colonial violence, slavery, and white supremacy is only the first step. Recognising and dismantling the racism that affects and is perpetuated in our institutions today is the essential next step. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art, the co-publishers of BAS, have both shared statements of solidarity in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and around the world. • From the Director, 5 June 2020, https://britishart.yale.edu/director • Our Commitment to Anti-Racism, 5 June 2020, https://www.paul- mellon-centre.ac.uk/about/news/our-commitment-to-anti-racism We want to echo these statements: as editors, we pledge to actively elevate the voices of Black scholars, curators, and artists, and put in the work required towards dismantling racism in our discipline and its contingent institutions. We will continue to commission and seek content that exposes the relationships between white supremacy and art history in research, writing, museological, and artistic practices in our journal, and collaborate with institutions in Britain and abroad who are committed to doing the same. This month, we met as a team to re-evaluate the subjects we publish on in BAS, and the authors and peer reviewers we commission. In terms of content commissioning, we will plan larger and more sustained projects, with the aim of working collaboratively with institutions to facilitate access to and publish new work on significant, yet underexplored archival and artistic material connected to Black artists’ practices in Britain. This summer, we will also introduce language guidelines at the journal for writing about race, colonial history, or slavery, as part of a wider re-evaluation of our own editorial ethic. Our editors will continue to meet monthly to evaluate this progress and set new goals as the work takes shape. Finally, we wish to acknowledge that while responses by individual cultural gatekeepers—such as journal editors—are crucial, they are not a substitute for the political and legislative changes demanded by Black Lives Matter, and can only be part of a much larger project. Licensing The Publishers of British Art Studies are committed to supporting scholarship on British art and architecture of all periods. This publication is made available free of charge at https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk. We ask users to identify the use of materials made available through this website and to provide an appropriate credit to the to the author and the publication, so that others may find and use our resources. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence (CC BY-NC 2.0 UK). 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