Windrush: “Positions of Enunciation”, from the Caribbean to Scandal & Celebration

In 2023 Makiya curated the exhibit ‘Indo + Caribbean: The Creation of a Culture’ at London Museum Docklands, which explored the history of Indian Indentureship after slavery. Currently undertaking PhD study into Colourism in the Caribbean, her working practice looks at highlighting the impacts of empire within the region.

She works across a range of media, crossing the boundaries of dimension and form, influencing application in approaching subject matter – socio-historical, built and natural environments. Her creative and curatorial grounding is underpinned by a sense of un/belonging between Africa, the Americas and Britain. Within this triangle, her background in spatial design and architecture can emerge.  

Jean has worked with several artists, such as: Lemi Ghariokwu, designer of Fela Kuti’s most pioneering albums, and photographer James Barnor, and within institutions, from London Museum to various schools and communities. 

Jean describes her earliest series in photo-collage, incorporating plasterboard and other media as painted ‘de-constructions’. Later work – notably, We’ve Already Paid: Journeys & Kinship at arc Gallery, introduced sugar cane paper – derived from the mono-crop of transatlantic enslavement. This has been viewed and discussed in respective iterations into the 2000s. Joseph has explored further: from plaster casts to fibre, to drive narrative. In 2023 as Artmaroon and co-founder of EARTHworks Artists’ Collective, she collaborated with University of Bristol to exhibit On Freedom: Whose Story? Whose Lens? 

Ongoing projects position environment at epicentre, counterbalancing industrial and climactic effects with cultural symbology, nature’s repair, arboreal legacies and dispersed ancestry.  

Best known for his beloved and much praised, The West Indian Front Room, which was the Geffrye Museum’s successful exhibition (2005-06), it has since been iterated in the Netherlands, Curacao, Johannesburg, Arles and Toronto inspired the BBC4 documentary Tales from the Front Room (2007), part of Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now (Tate Britain 2021-22, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 2022-23), and the basis of his book, The Front Room: Diaspora migrant Aesthetics in the Home (Lund Humphries 2023). The Front Room is also permanently at the Museum of the Home (formerly the Geffrye Museum) where Waiting for myself to appear his triptych film installation produced in collaboration with Dubmorphology is also on permanent display. Other work includes: Sonic Vibrations: Sound systems, lovers rock and dub, Walking in the Wake, a short produced for the Estuary Fesitval 2021,and I Miss My Mum’s Cookin’, which was nominated for a Brighton Fringe award.  

McMillan has the first Arts Doctorate from Middlesex University (2010), and is currently an Associate Lecturer in Cultural & Historical Studies at London College of Fashion (UAL), and VIAD Senior Research Associate at University of Johannesburg.   

She integrates her passions for arts, culture, community and education into exhibitions, events and art commentary. Her speciality is in public programming – hosting live performances, talks, interviews and poetry programs of which she extends as part of her practice as Programmes Curator and Producer at Museum of the Home. Working across the Creative Programmes and Collections & Curatorial team, as well as the Commercial division, her role centres on aligning the Museum’s programming within the core values and vision of engaging with the museum communities through fundraising and programming that interrogates critical societal issues via an artistic lens.

Gaynor co-founded EARTHworks[artists], a curatorial duo focused on fostering intergenerational creative collaborations. She holds a BA in History and the History of Ideas and an MA in Museum Cultures with Curating, specialising in decolonial approaches.