Casgliadau Arlein

This bronze work by the sculptor Herbert Ward depicts an African artist/artisan. It reveals a trend in Western artistic communities that were preoccupied with how people of different races looked as a way of othering them. The biases that such artists were projecting onto their African subjects is made evident in Ward’s writing. He stated, 'I feel deeply inside myself a feeling of fraternal pity for the Congolese people'.

Ward’s interaction with African identities and Blackness could be described as opportunistic at best or exploitative at worst, as he built his career on creating art, writing, and lecturing about Africans for exclusively white audiences following a five-year expedition to Congo, becoming unironically seen as an expert of sorts.

This work was included in the PITCH BLACK digital Black History tours of the National Museum Wales collections.