It’s been a great pleasure working with Tara Munroe, Director of Opal 22 Arts and Edutainment, over the past few months. Back in 2010 Tara made a remarkable discovery in the store room of Leicester Museum – an original set of Casta paintings dating back to the 1830’s. Casta paintings, she learned, were made in Mexico and were a product of the Spanish colonial era which attempted to categorise human beings using defined racial classifications, assigning to each a place in a human hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, one’s place in the hierarchy was defined by proximity to whiteness.
The paintings were abandoned, unloved and unrestored until Tara rediscovered them and spent the next several years raising finance to show them in a remarkable exhibition at Leicester Museum in late 2023. It’s fitting that the paintings were found in Leicester – a city which in 2013 was described as the most multi-cultural city in the world and which, in 2024, is a place where no one ethnic group forms more than 50% of its population.
Tara’s thoughtful and thought provoking curation of the exhibition was itself a rebuke to the ideas which underpinned the Casta paintings, inviting audiences to consider and reflect upon what we mean when we talk about ‘race’.
I look forward to completing the evaluation of this important project and hope that Opal 22’s work will help to inform future collaborations between black-led organisations and municipal cultural institutions.