Last weekend (Sat 1st April) our founder and Creative Director, Tara Munroe sat with the BBC’s Jennifer Harby to shed light on the Casta journey thus far.
Speaking from Leicester Museum and Gallery Tara Munroe said “I saw some paintings by the back door of the basement and, when I looked at them, I realised they weren’t like anything I had ever seen before.”I asked the curator at the time what was happening to them and he said they were probably going to get rid of them. “I said ‘Don’t do that’.”
That was the very beginning of what we have come to know as Opal22’s Casta project. The project studies a series of paintings known as Casta Paintings, one of the earliest forms of pictorial racial classification. Key tenets of the programme include restoration of the paintings, undertaken by Leicester Museum and Gallery, confirming provenance with the world’s leading authorities, and highlighting the narratives brought forth by bringing these paintings back into the public fore.
Read the full article using the link below.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-65092285
Special thanks to Jennifer Harby, BBC News.