It has been a delight for members of Lancaster Black History Group to collaborate with staff at the Judges Lodging Museum (Lancashire Museums) and the artist Lela Harris over the last 12 months on a commission which has culminated in the production of 6 new portraits of 18th century Lancastrians now installed in the museum. The new commissions are based on information obtained from church records, runaway slave adverts and family stories, alongside research undertaken by members of Lancaster Black History Group and other local historians.

The figures include Thomas Anson (a runaway from Dentdale) Frances Elizabeth Johnson (a slave-servant in a Lancaster town house), John Chance (a slave-servant in a Lancaster town house), Isaac Rawlinson, Molly and ‘Ebo Boy’, a young teenager who escaped from slavery at the home of a revered in Heysham, Lancashire. All of these Black Lancastrians arrived in the town at the height of Lancaster’s involvement in Atlantic Slavery & connected trade in plantation goods with the west-Indies and Americas.

The portraits of these Black Lancastrians are shown alongside portraits of people who benefited directly and indirectly (through inheritance and trade) from “the slavery business” including Abraham Rawlinson, Mary Hutton Rawlinson, Benjamin Satterthwaite and Jane Hardman, and in the context of a museum collection that includes fine furniture made from exotic goods – notably the mahogany furnitures made by Gillows which was felled by enslaved people in the Caribbean, and shipped into Lancaster.

The new commission formed part of a collaborative project, supported by Art Fund UK and the Association of Independent Museums (part of national lottery heritage fund), and also included workshops and an exhibition by local school children (led by Lela with LBH group co-founder Geraldine Onek).

On a personal note being part of the group who worked on this commission & worked with Lela as she researched and made the work has been utterly joyful

Imogen Tyler, March 2023

Lela at the launch of her exhibition in March 2023