Black Lives Matter has become the most widespread civil rights movement in history, and sparked a renewed reckoning with the way structural racism runs through our cultures. Over the year since George Floyd’s murder ignited protests and marches for Black Lives Matter across the country, Open Eye Gallery has reflected on and renewed our commitment to racial equality. As a gallery for photographic arts we are aware of the power and place photography has held in impacting and advancing recent civil rights movements, and how the camera can be both a key and a catalyst to creating a fairer, more just world. 

Championing socially engaged photographers and working with practitioners to train and engage our community with photographic arts is at the heart of everything we do. Across our team we have ensured our programme is as diverse as possible, working on a local, national and international level to engage our audiences. We have consistently achieved the highest rating for the Arts Council’s Creative Case for Diversity, but recognise that we are on a journey and have much more to do.

During Black History Month, we hosted a series of walking tours with historian Laurence Westgaph that exposed the often overlooked history of Liverpool and its connections with the history of slavery. Our recent exhibition as part of The Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Stomach and The Port features work from Zineb Sedira’s series Sugar Routes (2013) and Alberta Whittle’s film between a whisper and a cry (2019) which both directly address and challenge the impact the history of the transatlantic slave trade still has on our institutions and culture today. We are committed to acknowledging our institution’s role in the fight for racial equality and challenge ourselves, our artists, and our audiences to engage with and learn from this past which affects us all to this day. 

Our Love Is An Action programme, launched in June 2020, platformed activists, artists and writers of colour seeking to nurture the discourse around movements for racial justice in response to Black Lives Matter protests. For a period of six months we hired an artist, activist or writer of colour to take over our Instagram platform for a week, acting as curators and researchers to share projects and ideas from a range of fields and inspirations, shaping the agenda for conversations about diverse artists and works in the UK and further afield. 

Within our team, we have continued these conversations internally, introducing monthly ‘inclusivetea’ meetings to reserve time specifically for discussions around our commitment to improving Open Eye Gallery’s accessibility, and learning from outside practitioners to highlight and support where we can improve as an organisation. We are committed to the diversity agenda, and have been exploring ways in which we can enable a greater diversity of people to shape and engage with photography. Equality of access — to work here, to volunteer, to develop creative talent, and to visit, engage, and have your work profiled — is central to our success. We practice having an open line of communication across all levels of the organisation, and are committed to furthering the training and development of both staff and volunteers to open doors for a future generation of diverse socially engaged practitioners. 

Through consultation with an independent EDI specialist, we are in the process of updating our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy and Action Plan. Our inclusive practices will be built through a learning-based approach, and learning will be shared, documented and fed back into strategy and policy development. Staff will be encouraged to experiment with new approaches, to learn from their own experience and history, as well as from the experiences and best practices of others.

We are committed to learning, growing, and continuing to put attention towards the fight for racial equality, both at Open Eye Gallery and within our culture at large.