It's a difficult task to summarize October Gallery's long timeline of interactions with artists from Africa and the African diaspora. Furthermore, given the rapidly shifting landscapes of the art world (both local and global) over the last thirty-plus years, and with so many interconnecting streams at play, to retrace the arc of our involvement accurately would require a much longer text than this. What follows, then, is a series of memories arranged along a simple chronological timeline. It represents a subjective version of some of the extraordinary changes that have occurred during that period and describes events as I experienced them, from the particular perspective of London's October Gallery.
I arrived at October Gallery in 1987, a few years after finishing a postgraduate course in Fine Arts at the Royal College of Art, London. I first heard of October Gallery when Chili Hawes, who came to see my Degree Show...