An Illustrated Paper for academic use only, this is a personal framing of some of the historical, cultural and political influences which informed the development of the British Black Art Movement of the early 1980s. Specifically, this paper engages in a close examination of the archival memory of 'The Blk Art Group', a small association of visual artists active from 1979 to 1984, who existed as part of this wider art historical moment.

An earlier version of this paper was completed for the Blk Art Group symposium at the Graves Gallery, Sheffield in February 2012, and sections of this final version were presented at ‘Reframing the Moment, Legacies of the 1982 Blk Art Group Conference’, held on the 27th October 2012 at the University of Wolverhampton. This conference was organized by The Blk Art group Research Project 2012, of which Piper was a founder member.