Dr Anjalie Dalal-Clayton

Biography

Dr Anjalie Dalal-Clayton is an art historian, focussing on British artists of African and Asian descent. She is based at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute, where, as a Research Fellow, she is conducting research on museums, collecting and interpretation practices.

Anjalie is currently a Co-Investigator on the 2021-2024, UAL-led 'Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage' research project (one of five 'discovery' projects forming he Arts and Humanities Research Council’s 'Towards a National Collection', or TaNC, programme). Her role is to lead on strands of research that focus on surfacing bias across collections and resurfacing artists and artworks. Anjalie is also conducting an update of the Black Artists & Modernism audit, which surveys 35 national and civic collections for works by British-born or based artists with African, Asian and MENA-region heritage.

She was a Co-Investigator on the Tate-led research project 'Provisional Semantics: Addressing the challenges of representing multiple perspectives within an evolving digitised national collection' (one of eight 'foundation' projects forming the TaNC programme) between 2020 and 2022. This focused on how museums and heritage organisations can engage in decolonising practices to produce search terms, catalogue entries and interpretations fit for purpose for an evolving digitised national collection (https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/provisional-semantics).

In 2021, she co-produced a year-long, online workshop series for museum professionals in partnership with the Contemporary Art Society, titled 'Doing the Work: Embedding Anti-Racism and Decolonisation in Museum Practice'. The series comprised 7 workshops, each focusing on different, specific areas of museum work, and featuring presentations by exemplars in the field. The series culminated in several recorded videos accessible online via the Contemporary Arts Society and Decolonising Arts Institute web pages, and a publication containing six commissioned critical reflections on the issues raised and discussions that took place during the various workshops.

Prior to joining the Decolonising Arts Institute, she was a researcher on UAL’s 'Black Artists & Modernism' project (http://www.blackartistsmodernism.co.uk/). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and led by Prof. Sonia Boyce, the project sought to explore and make known the unique contributions that Britain’s black artists have made to the development of modernism in the visual arts. In the project, Dalal-Clayton conducted monographic research of artists including Sonia Boyce, Keith Piper and Tam Joseph, and she also led the first nation-wide audit of works by black artists in UK public collections. The audit informed the BBC documentary 'Whoever Heard of a Black Artist?', which first aired in July 2018 (https://cutt.ly/Vy5RVUN).

Dalal-Clayton completed her PhD at Liverpool John Moores University with a thesis titled 'Coming into View: Black Artists and Exhibition Cultures 1976-2010' (https://cutt.ly/Sy5Twhr), which she is developing into a monograph, 'Curating Black British Art: Exhibition Cultures since the 1980s' (Bloomsbury).