25 BLACK ARTISTS. ONE HOUSE. A CELEBRATION OF BLACK BRITISH ART.

For the next two weeks, Havant House is home to 25 Black artists, bringing together an incredible mix of painting, photography, sculpture and digital art.

Every ticket for Framed in Black has sold out, including the extra spaces we released for our public viewing days. We’re opening our doors to a full house, quite literally.

Curated by The Lemon Seed Project and Art for Hours, the exhibition brings together artists exploring different parts of the Black British experience. Identity, heritage, migration, resistance, belonging, joy and everything in between.

From established artists to emerging talent, there’s an exciting mix of perspectives, styles and stories under one roof. There isn’t one way to tell the story of Black British culture.

We’re also welcoming spoken-word artist Colette George to our private view, where she’ll perform three poems exploring ancestry, identity and beauty.

Before the doors open, let’s introduce you to the artists whose work will be filling Havant House.

MEET THE ARTISTS

Laji Sanusi

@lajisanusiart

Laji Sanusi is a self-taught artist and creative born and based in London. Working across traditional and digital art, his practice is rooted in experimentation, with work spanning cultural portraiture, identity and social issues. Sanusi’s work has appeared in publications and on platforms including Artists Responding To , Revolt and Dope Black Art, and has been exhibited at venues including London’s OXO Tower.

In 2023, he won a Sky TV and NOW TV prize for his artwork inspired by True Detective: Night Country. His commissioned work has also included a piece for television producer Nkechi Carroll, while his work is held by collectors internationally.

Exhibiting: Ms. Misunderstood

Samuel AncestoR

@samuelancestor

Samuel AncestoR (Samuel Olowomeye) is a self-taught Nigerian-born artist based in London. Working with acrylic, oil, charcoal and pastel, he creates highly detailed surreal paintings exploring symbolism, identity and the tensions between cultural inheritance and Western influence.

Exhibiting: Spoon-Feed

From the This Ear Rings On series, Spoon-Feed explores diasporic memory and dual belonging through the domestic plate, a symbol of food, family, cultural preservation and the tensions between life in Britain and connections to Nigeria.

Lindsey Daniella

@lindaniellaart

Lindsey Daniella is a London-based oil painter who centres Black women within pastoral landscapes inspired by Impressionism and Rococo portraiture. Her dreamlike scenes celebrate everyday softness, intimacy and joy while reimagining art-historical spaces where Black women have often been excluded.

Exhibiting: If We Had Danced and A Moment Away

In A Moment Away, Lindsey Daniella explores Black femininity through a quiet moment of contemplation. Her expressive use of light, colour and gesture creates a sense of intimacy and stillness. By leaving her figures’ facial features undefined, Lindsey makes space for Black women to exist beyond the expectations placed upon them, celebrating softness, connection and the beauty of simply being.

DOWNES (Nicoy Downes)

@downes.art

Nicoy Downes, known professionally as DOWNES, is a UK artist whose work draws on Caribbean heritage and experiences of life in Britain. Working principally in oil paint, he uses portraiture, distinctive perspectives and colour to explore identity, belonging and change.

Exhibiting: MIGRATION

Originally a reflection on resistance to change, MIGRATION explores migration, belonging, cultural inheritance and the ways communities navigate change while maintaining ties to home and identity.

ZABE

@portraitsbyzabe

ZABE is a self-taught British-Nigerian artist based in London, specialising in contemporary oil portraiture. Through bold colour and expressive brushwork, she explores identity, memory, grief and human connection, drawing on personal experience, family archives and intimate portraiture.

Exhibiting: Proof of Life

Proof of Life is a self-portrait centred on joy, identity and resilience. It captures freedom and self-expression, presenting joy as evidence of survival and presence, and celebrates confidence and individuality.

Yvadney Davis

@yvadneydavisart

South London artist Yvadney Davis draws on her Caribbean British heritage to explore cultural memory, ancestry and belonging through painting, printmaking and textiles. Her practice incorporates domestic materials associated with the West Indian front room.

Exhibiting: Hurricane No. 1

From She is Made of Moving Things, this print explores climate colonialism and Caribbean hurricanes, personified as an enslaved woman embodying strength, vengeance and grief.

Kiera-Grace

Instagram: @kiera.grace

Kiera-Grace is a Black British artist exploring memory, cultural transmission, the body and archival traces. Her layered paintings and mixed-media works draw on family histories, diasporic experience and the distortions of recollection, using oil paint, acrylic, collage and image transfer.

Exhibiting: Now that we know, how do we live?

Michael Akuagwu

@_manlikemike

London-born multimedia artist and designer Michael Akuagwu explores society and culture through photography, surrealism, mixed media, design and film. A former V&A and Adobe artist-in-residence, his work questions the relationship between contemporary culture, faith, history and Black British identity.

Exhibiting: BHM18

BHM18 challenges the tendency to foreground American history during Black History Month in Britain. Featuring books by David Olusoga, Reni Eddo-Lodge and Afua Hirsch, it invites viewers to rediscover the depth of Black British history.

Jjacqz

@jjacqz

Jjacqz is a London-based poet, filmmaker and visual storyteller whose work combines photography, film and poetry into what she calls visual poetry. Born to Ugandan parents and raised in East London, she explores love, identity, migration and belonging through atmospheric, narrative-led imagery.

Exhibiting: Chijioke

Kazvare

@kazvaremadeit

Kazvare is a British illustrator and artist whose work uses text, humour and cultural commentary to examine race, identity and contemporary British life. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Forbes, GQ and The Guardian.

Exhibiting: Stop & Search

Stop & Search juxtaposes contemporary commentary about the policing of Black boys with archival descriptions of policing from 1901, questioning the gap between claims of impartiality and unequal experiences of care and protection. The work references Richard Okorogheye.

Myles Terry

@mt_afrofuturist

Myles Terry is a young artist exploring identity and culture, with a particular interest in the richness, expressiveness and cultural power of Afro hair.

Exhibiting: Afro Identity

Her hair might make her seem mysterious; however, it tells a story of complexity that completes, rather than hides, her identity.

Venetta Nicole

@venetta__nicole

Venetta Nicole is a London-based Caribbean artist exploring abstraction, emotional experience and identity through painting and sculpture. Her work uses colour, shape, line and texture to explore vulnerability and connection, including the place of young Black men in contemporary society. She received the Women in Art Prize Susan Angoy Award in 2022.

Soft Witness explores the vulnerability of young Black boys and the ways they are seen, understood and treated by society. Surrounded by flowers, the young figure holds a quiet softness, challenging the expectation that Black boys must grow up quickly or conceal their emotions. Venetta invites us to consider the importance of tenderness, protection and allowing children the freedom to simply be children.

SOYSHEM

@soyshem_

Soyshem (Shemelle Soyebo) is a self-taught London-based visual artist of Nigerian and Barbadian heritage. Working in acrylic on canvas and African-print fabric, she explores migration, adaptation, identity and the coexistence of cultures across generations.

Exhibiting: Ascend

Ascend explores the Black British experience through the meeting of African diasporic traditions and contemporary Western culture, reflecting adaptation, evolution and coexistence.

Carla Sealey

@nakedclayceramics

Carla Sealey is a ceramic and glass artist-maker exploring pre-colonial African architecture, Indigenous histories and cultural memory. Working principally with terracotta, she builds, carves and decorates tactile vessels that celebrate the beauty of unglazed clay and challenge narratives shaped by colonialism.

Exhibiting: Not lost, just hidden / The Library, Timbuktu

Two hand-built terracotta vessels decorated with sand-carved motifs. Drawing on pre-colonial African architecture and culture, the works reclaim ancestry and honour clay's enduring role as a building material across Africa.

Tajai Brown

@tajaibrownart

Tajai Brown is a UK-based expressionist painter creating vibrant portraits that celebrate Black femininity, self-empowerment and cultural identity. Her work explores transformation, vulnerability, authenticity and the possibility of rest beyond expectations of constant resilience.

Exhibiting: We Rest Here

We Rest Here explores rest, resilience, connection and the quiet weight of continually moving forward. Through a dreamlike landscape and expressive mark-making, it invites reflection on what it means to pause and rest together.

Erica Nuamah

@ericaghn

Born in Kumasi, Ghana, in 1999, Erica Nuamah has lived in London since the age of two. She studied Visual Arts and Design at the BRIT School and Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her practice combines culture and environment in reimagined landscapes that contribute to Black archives.

Exhibiting: DWARE! (Bath time in a Black British household)

DWARE! depicts a traditional Ghanaian bathing practice, using a ladle and sapɔ (African net sponge), set in a South London council flat. It explores how culture and tradition continue within the Black British diaspora.

Alesha Pryce

@artbyaleshapryce

Alesha Pryce is a Black British interdisciplinary artist and researcher of Jamaican heritage, working across ceramics, sculpture, moving image and installation. A Royal College of Art MA Ceramics & Glass graduate, she explores Black womanhood, ancestry and cultural memory through vessels, hair, archives and traditions of beauty.

Exhibiting: The Queen Charlotte

The Queen Charlotte reimagines regality through a Black feminine lens, bringing classical sculpture together with Black British hair culture. Inspired by Black Beauty and Hair magazines, it honours Black women's beauty, power, community and intergenerational traditions.

Izrahyel Francis

@izrahyel

Izrahyel Francis is a Montserrat-born Caribbean artist based in Birmingham, UK. Working primarily with acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, he creates bold, symbolic figurative paintings shaped by Afro-Caribbean heritage, displacement, visibility, desire, protection and the search for belonging. His practice sits within the idea of Life Gets Better Here , exploring how pressure, humour, tenderness and inherited knowledge shape the ways people navigate everyday life. Through expressive figures and layered symbolism, Francis considers what we carry with us — culturally, emotionally and across generations — while creating space for complexity, intimacy and humour within contemporary Caribbean and Black British experience.

Exhibiting: Don't Die For Yansh

Don’t Die For Yansh explores the economy of intimacy — what we exchange in pursuit of love, attraction and validation, and what we believe those things are worth. Across the table, a man and woman negotiate more than a date. The man appears to offer parts of himself while sitting against a chair resembling a tombstone. Opposite him, the woman weighs a mirror against a heart. A muted ear, cracked Sankofa egg and warri board bring ideas of ignored wisdom, strategy and consequence into the scene. Using humour and exaggeration, Francis turns romance into a marketplace and asks: what are you willing to sacrifice to be desired?

Sharon James

@sharonjamesartist

Sharon James works across painting, digital collage and photography, using colour, texture, memory and cultural references to explore Black childhood and adulthood. Her work considers identity, belonging, family, sexuality and the complexity of Black British experience through joy, vulnerability and resistance.

Exhibiting: Black in the 80’s

A visual celebration of the 1980s through a Black British lens, combining abstract painting, digital collage, imagery and embellishment to explore childhood memories, popular culture and identity.

Gary March

@garymarchdesign

Gary March is a British-Caribbean sculptor whose practice is shaped by his upbringing in Birmingham and experiences of migration, racial inequality and cultural belonging. Working with stone, wood and reclaimed materials, he transforms personal and collective histories into sculptural reflections on memory, identity and resilience.

March's sculptural practice brings together migration, childhood, mental health and the Black British experience, using material and form to explore remembrance and personal history.

Exhibiting: Farewell, the Sea, the Moon and the Sky. Windrush

Gary describes a sculpted head and the interior of its cranium capturing a moment of memory: the sensation of a cherished but distant place and the experience of saying goodbye to home beneath a cloudy night sky. The sculpture reflects the Windrush generation and the complicated relationship between migration, belonging and home. It considers not only what we leave behind, but what we carry with us.

Exhibiting: River Boy River King

Inspired by Gary’s childhood in Birmingham, this sculpture recalls the river where he and his friends would escape to play and invent adventures. Through imagination, they transformed themselves from river boys into river kings. The work celebrates childhood as a space of freedom, creativity and possibility, while exploring the importance of place and memory in shaping Black British identity.

Exhibiting: A Troubled Soul

A Troubled Soul explores the tension between how we present ourselves to the world and what we experience internally. At first, the sculpture appears calm and still. But its face acts as a mask, attempting to fit into society, while the flowing, sometimes chaotic hair represents conflicting thoughts and emotions. Together, these elements reveal the complexity of mental health, identity and the struggle between outward appearances and inner experience.

Yeside Linney

@yesidelinney

Yeside Linney is a British-Nigerian artist whose landscape-based figurative practice explores healing, reclamation and cultural reconnection. Following four decades as an English teacher, she developed a studio practice drawing on ancestral knowledge, dual heritage and the Surrey countryside.

Exhibiting: Crowning Glory

Crowning Glory reflects the complexity of Black women and natural hair as a site of spirituality, ancestry, creativity and resistance. Locs, braids and coils carry cultural memory while confronting discrimination. The work honours Black hair as sacred inheritance and sovereign identity.

Shai Digital

@shai.digital

Shai Digital is a Ghanaian-British visual storyteller passionate about portraiture. Her vibrant digital paintings explore identity, diaspora, healing and Black joy through intimate glimpses of shared experience.

Exhibiting: Everything but the Bathroom Sink

A celebration of the creativity and chaos of Black hair maintenance, and the shared language of coils, curls, braids, twists and beads. The work honours the labour, beauty and self-expression woven into Black hair culture.

Jasmine Rosten-Edwards

@oneoffto25

Jasmine Rosten-Edwards is a self-taught Surrey-based artist working across portraiture, figurative abstraction and abstract painting on canvas.

Exhibiting: Slouch

A contemplative figure anchors a vibrant reflection on Black British identity, heritage and resilience. The painting celebrates the diversity of Black experience and the possibility of quiet peace amid a fractured world.

Patrick Qwesi

@patrick_qwesi

Patrick Qwesi is a Black British artist drawing on his Zambian heritage and South London upbringing. Influenced by graffiti, his expressive, textured portraiture explores identity, perception, heritage and belonging through acrylic, oil sticks and layered colour.

Exhibiting: The Last African

The Last African explores how technology, rising living costs and social change reshape cultural identity. Its layered, mask-like face evokes protection and transformation, asking what we lose, preserve and become.

Buzzawe

@buzzawe

Buzzawe (Abigail Okpako) is a British-Nigerian artist working primarily in oil portraiture. Her work explores identity, heritage and emotional depth, centring narratives that are often overlooked or simplified.

Exhibiting: Beyond the Blues

Beyond the Blues is a reclamation of narrative and a tribute to resilience. Referencing the blues tradition, it centres contemporary joy and emotional freedom, challenging narrow assumptions through symbols of curiosity, individuality and self-definition.

DISCOVER THE EXHIBITION

Framed in Black is a collaboration between The Lemon Seed Project and Art for Hours, bringing together different perspectives on Black British culture within the familiar surroundings of a home.

Public viewing dates are 24 and 31 October 2026. All tickets have sold out. Selected works will remain available through The Lemon Seed Project online gallery after the exhibition.