The Art of Britain’s Windrush Generation Has Never Felt More Relevant
At a time of rising xenophobia and nativism, their work examines the meeting of different cultures, and their own right to belong.

By Aatish Taseer
NY Times
Nov 18, 2025

Link to article https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/t-magazine/windrush-generation-britain-artists.html

THE H.M.T. EMPIRE Windrush was a ship that carried one of the first large groups of passengers from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom in 1948. But its name went on to become shorthand for an entire generation, roughly half a million people who emigrated out of Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean between the late 1940s and the early 1970s to the seat of a dying empire. This was a group that had been invited to Britain to rebuild the country after the Second World War. Many of them had served in Britain’s armed forces. And yet, once they’d outlived their purpose, the British government left them to fend for themselves. In 2017, during the premiership of Boris Johnson, it began to surface that the Home Office had wrongly classified some members of the Windrush generation, which led to the deportation of about 80 people. Others were denied access to work, health care and benefits.

The Windrush scandal spoke to dispossession in a literal sense, but it was also a symbolic erasure of the Caribbean community’s contribution to British cultural life in the latter part of the 20th century. Everything from the Notting Hill Carnival to Zadie Smith; reggae and calypso; new language and new fruits (soursop, custard apple) resulted from this postcolonial encounter, which, in the words of the British Sri Lankan activist A. Sivanandan, might be summarized as “we are here because you were there.”

Windrush is in one sense the ultimate symbol of an imposed dislocation, of homelessness, of people on a ship adrift on the waves of history. There are reminders all over Britain, like the renaming of a transit line in London to Windrush in 2024. It’s also an artistic movement. At a moment of rising xenophobia and nativism across the world, three artists — the painter Hurvin Anderson, 60, the multimedia artist Sonia Boyce, 63, and the sculptor Veronica Ryan, 69 — each have recently had shows in New York that examine the postwar meeting of Caribbean and British cultures, and their own individual right to belong. Their work, in oblique and direct ways, captures the strain of balancing multiple societies in one’s head — “I was essentially making paintings,” as Anderson has said, “of one place but actually thinking about another” — but also of bearing witness to the double vision that colonialism produced, that two-way traffic of looking and being looked at.

THE SAME YEAR the Windrush docked at Tilbury in Essex, Jean-Paul Sartre, in “Black Orpheus,” his prophetic essay heralding the dawn of the postcolonial era, observed, “For 3,000 years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen.” Sartre was thinking broadly about how colonialism changes perception, but he also foresaw the “shock” and rage that would ensue from it. “Today,” he writes, “these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes.” What was less easy to predict was how sly, unpredictable and disruptive this confrontation between former subject and master could be.

The Caribbean was the locus for the forced meeting of disparate peoples. Of all the British colonies, it was the best metaphor for the colonial enterprise as a whole. (“Geographies of pain” is how the British Jamaican writer Hazel V. Carby describes it in her 2019 book, “Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands.”) Each island became a distinctive creation of European power and capital. Anderson’s parents left Spanish Town, Jamaica, for Birmingham, England; his father arrived in 1961 and his mother followed in 1963. His show at Michael Werner Gallery (on view through January 2026) deals not with the immigrant experience in Britain but with Jamaica — the country where his entire family was born (Anderson was the only one of his eight siblings to be born in Britain, in 1965), but which he only visited for the first time at the age of 14. In pieces like “Beaded Curtain (Red Apples)” and “Constructed View,” both from 2010, he depicts the unpeopled landscapes of an imagined homeland. The question of a melancholy return is dramatized through physical barriers of every kind (curtains, screens, fences and walls) that produce the sense of an insider-outsider looking in on scenes of large-leaved verdure. There is a disquiet in these depictions of silence and solitude in a place as busy and musical as the Caribbean. They speak to something cherished that remains forever out of reach. Anderson is only too aware of how the strands of history that he embodies — Britain, the Caribbean, Africa — can amplify feelings of what another Windrush artist, Claudette Johnson, has called “unbelongingness.” But these sensations have allowed him entry into multiple societies. “I feel like part of it is mine, you know,” he says haltingly when I ask what gives his Jamaica paintings their special power. “That part of this place belongs to me.”

THE ACT OF using art to take possession of what history has denied you is central to the spirit of the Windrush movement. But if reclamation through art comes easily to Anderson, Veronica Ryan is a profile in diffidence. “My studio happens to be where I am,” she says, as if suspicious of any fixed idea of home. Ryan, whose work is currently on view at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, is a self-identified magpie and was born on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat. Having received a classical British education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, she has established a practice, now incorporating shelving units, now pendulous nets that hang from the ceiling, that can feel like an exploration of materiality. To enter a room where she’s been at work is to enter the air of a musty provisions shop. Bronze, plaster, stone, cloth, seeds and found objects are arranged in such a way that they give the impression of an artist who has abandoned the possibility of inner coherence, whether it be cultural or even related to a single system of thought. Magic, syncretism, religion, pathology and psychology bleed into her art, as do the different societies — Britain, the United States, Montserrat and Nigeria — that her work references. Over a video call from London, her graying dreadlocks tied in a topknot, she tells me of the time she was asked to give a talk about what it means to be a Black woman artist. The money was good, but she turned it down. It felt too reductive. “I thought, ‘No,’ ” she says, “ ‘this is not a question I’m going to start off with.’ ”

At the same time, history has come after Ryan in ways that can feel spooky. In 1995, a volcano on Montserrat erupted, all but entombing her place of origin. In 2004, there was a fire at a storage facility in East London where hundreds of works of art, including ones by Ryan, were destroyed. Ryan, who has jokingly described herself as a “bag lady,” a willful vagrant carrying her sense of home within her, was tested by real losses in the physical world, including the deaths of several family members. After the Windrush scandal was exposed, she made what must be her most overtly political work. In 2021, on a commission by the East London district of Hackney, she installed three sculptures made from marble and bronze, of a breadfruit, a custard apple and a soursop, in Narrow Way Square to honor the Windrush generation. When her mother saw the sculptures, she prayed. She had eaten soursop while pregnant with Ryan. Hackney, now full of what Ryan refers to as “hedge-fund kids,” had been a fearful place for her as a child. There were racist skinheads and Teddy boys, members of a working-class youth subculture who often wore Edwardian-style drape suits. “I still have a kind of memory and anxiety,” Ryan says of the streets where her art is now exhibited, “about what it was like formerly.”

“There was reggae and there was punk,” Sonia Boyce tells me over Zoom from London, seeming to use the two genres of music as metonyms for diversity and a countervailing strain of whiteness that was always opposed to it. She, for her part, never lost sight of the reactionary forces arrayed against a multiethnic Britain. We are speaking only days after an anti-immigration rally, led by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, brought some 150,000 people into the streets of central London. “We are on a permanent alert of our precarity,” Boyce says. The British Afro-Caribbean recipient of the 2022 Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale — and the first Black woman to represent Britain there — was careful to note that this diaspora has given us an art so varied that it defies classification. “The similarities of discrimination have bound us together,” Boyce says. A star since the 1980s, when she was part of the British Black Arts Movement, she exudes urgency, as if she was never allowed the luxury of ambiguity. She was only 5 when she went with her older sister to do some shopping for her parents in London’s East End. As the two girls stood there, money in hand, and the shopkeeper let one white customer after another go before them, they realized, with all the perplexity of children navigating an adult world booby-trapped against them, that their color prevented them from being served. Her family had come to Britain as loyal subjects of the Empire. Nothing prepared them for the waves of hostility they received. Nor was return a viable option. As a 27-year-old visiting the Caribbean for the first time, Boyce was intimately aware of only ever being “the English girl.”

These two hard imperatives — of neither being welcome at the metropole nor having a place to return to — form the unsentimental understructure of Boyce’s recent show at Hauser & Wirth in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. In works like “Silent Disco” (2025), a video installation about a party where dancers listen to music on headphones, we are treated to all the joy and beauty of Britain’s diversity — but like all liminal spaces, it’s edged with the tragedy of a nocturnal safety that the harsh light of day will devour. In an adjacent room, a video work called “Carmen” (2025), based on the life of the British Guyanese stage actress Carmen Munroe, addresses the ways in which Britain almost unknowingly elects to forget some people who’ve enriched its cultural life. There’s been scant documentation of much of Munroe’s career, even though she’s been on the stage since the early ’60s.

Boyce is almost grateful for these clarifying moments — the Windrush scandal, the current attack on, in her words, “so-called illegal immigrants” in the United States — that dispel the romance and illusions of a postwar experiment in diversity that seems to be sputtering to an end on both sides of the Atlantic. Years after the Windrush scandal, many of those affected are still in legal limbo, awaiting compensation and citizenship documents. Over 50 have died without any real justice. Boyce recalls how her parents’ generation had been afraid for their children’s status, while certain their own position, as imperial subjects, was unassailable. Yet it was they, not their children, against whom a veiled scheme of repatriation had been hatched. The logic of Windrush, in Boyce’s mind, was an extension of the logic that led to the establishment of Caribbean societies. As she puts it, “You came, you rebuilt, we don’t need you anymore. Bye-bye.”