Repositioning the work of Tam Joseph: from social commentary to aesthetic value

The British artist Tam Joseph (b.1947) has worked extensively and continually for the past fifty years with a practice encompassing painting, drawing, and sculpture. His work is held in several notable public collections across the UK and two particular paintings from his body of work – ‘Spirit of the Carnival’ (1982) and ‘UK School Report’ (1984) - appear regularly in collection displays and survey exhibitions in public art museums. On this basis, one might understand Joseph as having made an important contribution to contemporary British art, and that he ought to feature in mainstream narratives of British art since the 1980s. However, one need only scan through the names of the many artists who have featured in major survey texts and exhibitions of British art since the 1980s to realise that Joseph is absent from established and popular constructions of British art history. This case study is concerned with the contribution of public museums and collections to this outcome. My research of the acquisition, interpretation and display history surrounding Joseph’s work reveals that Joseph’s work has been presented almost entirely in terms of its socio-political content and contexts, rather than in terms of its relationship to the canon of British art and contemporary art history. On the basis that Joseph is not the only racialised and minoritised artist whose work has been subjected to this delimiting and partial approach to interpretation, I reflect on the potential of the Transforming Collection project’s machine learning text analyser prototype to help art historians, curators and collections cataloguers to identify at scale where this occurs, and propose a slow, object-centred, and artist-directed approach to producing collections information as a proven, effective remedy.