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This portfolio was published in 2007 to support the foundation of Rivington Place, a public gallery and community space in Shoreditch, London. Rivington Place describes itself as the UK’s "first permanent public space dedicated to diversity in the visual arts" and is housed in an award-winning building designed by David Adjaye, a British architect of Ghanaian descent. As well as hosting regular exhibitions, film screenings, talks, and performances, it is the home of the Association of Black Photographers (Autograph ABP), the International Institute of Visual Arts (Iniva), and the Stuart Hall Library. The artists selected to contribute to the portfolio were chosen for their international reputations and commitment to creating work dealing explicitly with contemporary cultural issues.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

Isaac Julien was born in London, his parents having emigrated from St. Lucia after the Second World War. Although he is known principally as a filmmaker and installation artist, Julien has endeavored to break down boundaries between different artistic disciplines in order to explore issues of race, identity, gender, and sex. These two digital prints are stills from Baltimore, an eleven-minute film that Julien made in 2003. The film tracks two African American figures—Angela, a female dancer, and the actor and director Melvin Van Peebles (a key figure within Blaxploitation cinema)—as they circulate around the city of Baltimore and its museums. In these enigmatic and unsettling images, waxworks from the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, which celebrates the history of endeavor and achievement by African Americans, have been resituated in the galleries of the Walters Art Museum, where they confront European paintings. Julien regularly teaches and exhibits in the United States. In 2013, the film Ten Thousand Waves was installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016