Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition (February 21 - June 1, 2025) at The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, focuses on the transatlantic slave trade between 1750 and 1850. It examines Britain's role in trafficking more captive African people than any other European power, from ports in West Africa to British and European plantations in the Caribbean and Americas, in one of the largest forced migrations in history. Second in a series after Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (September 8, 2023 - January 7, 2024), the exhibition highlights the financial aid and extensive collection of artworks and objects Cambridge has received from Richard Fitzwilliam, the grandson of a merchant who profited from slave-trading. The exhibition's lead curator is Victoria Avery, a professor of European sculpture at the University, while its co-curator is visual artist and writer Wanja Kimani.

In 2019, Cambridge’s then Vice-Chancellor, Stephen J Toope, created an advisory group to address the public’s growing interest in the university’s historical links to enslavement and the slave trade. The group’s findings led to a number of institutional changes, including acquiring contemporary works to make the permanent collection more inclusive, diversifying the workforce and the development of this exhibition series.

In her essay for the exhibition catalogue, I’ll think of a title after I write, Kimani addresses the reality of these changes, stating, “It requires minimal effort for institutions built with capital gained through racial violence such as The Fitzwilliam Museum to soothe their guilt by purchasing work by Black artists. Similarly, it takes little effort to employ Black women on fixed-term contracts to carry out work that requires emotional labour but limits their ability to effect tangible change.”

Kimani problematises the exclusion of those with Black lived experience from crucial decision-making, along with a lack of permanent contracts offered to the new, diverse staff. “The museum is nearly halfway through the programme and I believe that whilst the inherent imbalance of power that is ingrained in the hierarchy at the museum remains, nothing will change,” she adds.

The British-Nigerian artist Joy Labinjo’s An Eighteenth-Century Family (2022), which opens this exhibition, was the first painting by a Black artist to enter the museum’s permanent collection in 2022. Featuring the abolitionist and writer, Olaudah Equiano, the painting draws on 18th century British artist Thomas Gainsborough’s idealised portraits of family life. It imagines a Black family in Georgian Britain, capturing lives that were usually never pictorially documented.

The exhibition also chronicles Equiano’s life through a collection of objects, including his will and inventory (1797), a certificate of his marriage to Susannah Cullen – and drums or Nigeria Igba, made in the early 20th century by an unrecorded Igbo maker, that offer insight into his homeland and Igbo culture. In the background, the audience can hear the names of 29 African women and young girls, all enslaved plantation workers, from a page in the Hillsborough Plantation Inventory, Dominica (1818), playing in a seemingly endless loop and communicating the sheer number of African people who faced violence, commodification and dehumanisation across British colonial plantations.

The exhibition features Jan van Meyer’s The daughters of Sir Matthew Decker, Bart (1718), an oil painting of the daughters of the slave-trader who was responsible for Fitzwilliam’s riches. Decker helped establish the South Sea Company in 1711, which monopolised the trafficking of West African people to Spanish colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean. He also invested in the East India Company and Royal African Company, allowing him to accumulate an impressive art collection that now lives at the museum.

The daughters of Sir Matthew Decker, Bart represents the contrast between Britain’s success as a nation and the sources of this amassed wealth, which came from the slave trade and the commodities forced labour produced, such as tobacco, cotton and sugar, all in demand in 18th century Europe. A young Catherine Decker delicately holds a bunch of grapes in her hands, a fruit reserved for the rich at the time. The four girls in the painting are clad in luxurious silks and satins, wearing bright and opulent shades of red, blue and gold. They are surrounded by endless beauty, showcased through the arched entrance, tall trees and palatial space behind them, a beauty they have never been deprived of.

Adebunmi Gbadebo’s In Memory of Carrie Dash, 1903–1930, Here I Lay My Burden Down, B.A.S., (2023) is a clay pot sourced from the True Blue Plantation Cemetery, South Carolina. Gbadebo’s ancestors worked on the pot and her mother’s ashes were interred in it. In her essay, Kimani recognises Gbadebo's practice as one that “respectfully retrieves soil from the perimeters of the burial grounds” and brings it together with Nigerian techniques of making pots, such as the coil technique, allowing her body to carry knowledge that “enslaved people embodied when they were forcibly trafficked. She [Gbadebo] says, ‘when we couldn’t take anything, when things were taken away from us, we always carried our relationship with the land’”. This large vessel sits in the vitrine as a symbol of remembrance, while also capturing Gbadebo’s ways of living with the aftermath of slavery.

While the exhibition attempts to explore this aftermath with Jahnavi Inniss’ quilt, a living work that will continue to document key Black figures in British history, it leaves the audience with a question: “if we’re still having conversations about the harms caused by racism and societal inequalities today, then how much has really changed in over 200 years?”

The exhibition largely focuses on a linear, historical narrative, incorporating a few contemporary works. Kimani’s insights show that while The Fitzwilliam addresses Britain's history of oppression and violence during the transatlantic slave trade, there is a discomfort within the institution when it comes to addressing Black lived experience in the contemporary, which Kimani credits to “the predominantly white, middle-class individuals who collectively manage The Fitzwilliam Museum”.

Real change is slow, Kimani noted. Speaking to STIR, she said, “Reparative justice is more than an outward display. It takes time, resources and will to do the internal work and temporary exhibitions are not deeply entrenched into the institution’s fabric.”

‘Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition’ is on view at The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge from February 21 - June 1, 2025.