The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
'The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure' was a major group exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2024. Curated by the former Director of the ICA, Ekow Eshun, it featured paintings and sculptures by 22 artists including two paintings by Kimathi Donkor. The museum declared they would highlight "the use of figures to illuminate the richness and complexity of Black life. As well as surveying the presence of the Black figure in Western art history, we examine its absence – and the story of representation told through these works, as well as the social, psychological and cultural contexts in which they were produced." The ticketed exhibition was accompanied by a programme of events as well as by a 192-page catalogue and a smaller 112-page introduction to the artists. The show was widely reviewed and received extensive coverage in major UK publications, including the Evening Standard, The Observer, The Telegraph, Frieze, The Guardian and the BBC. Subsequently, 'The Time Is Always Now' was scheduled to tour at three further national and international venues: The Box in Plymouth, England; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA; and the North Carolina Museum of Art, USA. List of works by Kimathi Donkor: Harriet Tubman En Route to Canada (2012) Nanny of the Maroons Fifth Act of Mercy (2012) List of participating artists: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Jordan Casteel, Noah Davis, Godfried Donkor, Kimathi Donkor, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Titus Kaphar, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Chris Ofili, Jennifer Packer, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Thomas J Price, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor and Barbara Walker.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.079 | 0.020 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".