New Arts Exhibition Sheds Light On South Yorkshire’s Hidden Racial History

Image: Dig Where You Stand

A new and ground-breaking arts exhibition sheds light on South Yorkshire’s hidden racial history. Commissioned and curated by Dig Where You Stand, artworks will be displayed around Sheffield from Saturday 20th July to Sunday 18th August 2024.

Fourteen artists of colour, all based in South Yorkshire, have explored local archives and produced dynamic new work to reveal the unknown history of people of colour in the region, as part of a project supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Just as histories are written across a city, this multi venue exhibition will display artworks across a range of highly visible public spaces. Make your way around Sheffield city centre and be moved by a stirring mixture of painting, poetry, puppetry, soundscapes, film, textiles, and live performance.

This free exhibition grants access to stories that have been hidden deep within the archive and breathes life into people often reduced to bare facts, figures or silence. In doing so it helps re-narrate the North, dispelling the myth of a pure white past glorified in mainstream historical accounts, while demonstrating how deeply rooted people of colour are in the region’s foundations.

I grew up Black in Sheffield without a sense of history connected to the contemporary culture that surrounded me. Dig Where You Stand is an innovative, creative and soulful corrective to the reductive version of Sheffield we so often see in mainstream media, Johny Pitts, artist and advisor to Dig Where You Stand

Dig Where You Stand was originally developed by writer and activist Désirée Reynolds during her residency at Sheffield City Archives in 2021. Using art to navigate the fragments and gaps contained within the archives, Reynolds recovered and reimagined the stories of several local working-class Black and Brown people. These were showcased in a series of sold out exhibitions and documented through articles published by Now Then Magazine.

Dig Where You Stand isn’t about kings and queens but ordinary people who end up in the archive as fragments of a will, notice in a newspaper, play bills or a baptismal record. Black and Brown people and other racialised communities have been here for centuries and we want to bring that out. Désirée Reynolds, Creative Director of Dig Where You Stand.

This exhibition is made possible by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. With thanks to National Lottery players.