The chapter analyses how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, and the relationship between negatively racialised artists and the art world. The first two sections cover from the colonial period to the first half of the twentieth century and address the representation and participation of Black and Indigenous people, using examples from visual arts, literature, music and dance. White and mixed-race artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in primitivist and paternalist ways, although some displayed socialist sympathies in depictions of social inequality, without racism coming into clear view. By the 1930s and 40s, Black artists were critiquing social inequalities and explicitly identifying racism. We then analyse the increasing politicisation of Black art practice, which was linked to international currents such as Négritude and Black Power. Also important was the Black social movement in the country, which began in the 1960s and gathered strength with Colombia’s 1991 constitutional multiculturalist reform. The fourth section explores the work of the Colombian artists – mostly but not exclusively Black – who collaborated with us in CARLA to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.

The Colored Conventions were an enduring part of Frederick Douglass’s life. He first attended a convention in 1843. Decades later, his voice defined the national Colored Convention of 1883 with a powerful speech on the value of Black activism, “Why Hold A Colored Convention?” Over the years, Douglass worked alongside tens of thousands of African Americans to build state, regional, and national coalitions. The challenges of forging a national coalition shaped many convention debates, reaching beyond slavery and freedom to focus on citizenship and Black civil, legal, educational, and voting rights. Before the Civil War, those debates helped push Douglass from a focus on the immorality of slavery to the political issues facing northern Black communities. During and after Reconstruction, he became the dean of Black activism, guiding attempts at national conventions in New York, Washington, DC, Louisiana, and Kentucky to mobilize the power of Black communities across the country.