Artists Steve Dwoskin and Sonia Boyce with curator Rachel Garfield

AS racism continues to plague football, Donald Rodney’s image of legendary Liverpool player John Barnes kicking a banana into touch continues to pack a political punch.
As a black Briton, born and bred in Birmingham, the artist was no stranger to racism and realised that if he was to have any identity he would have to create it himself.
Racism wasn’t his only cross to bear. He also suffered form sickle-cell anaemia, a body-wasting disease that confined him to a wheelchair before his death in 1998.
The image of John Barnes, printed on glass and lit from the back like an X-ray light-box, signifies that rottenness is often hidden behind a fancy facade.
It is featured in a collection of paintings and other works in an exhibition, Radical and Modest – Work, Leisure and the Everyday, at the Ben Uri Gallery, London Jewish Museum, in St John’s Wood.
Group shows are often a curate’s egg – a mixture of the bad and the beautiful, the great and the good and those with more modest ambitions.
Prominent are two Vorticist drawings from David Bomberg – Race Horses and Ghetto Theatre – showing the intersecting linear lines of force that he would abandon during his later realist period.
Current Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller came to prominence with his recreation of the Battle of Orgreave during the 1984 Miners’ Strike. Here, he includes a small print derived from his large wall drawing The History of the World.
Josef Herman is represented by a number of small sketches of miners, peasants and musicians – each intended as a tribute to the creative power of working people.
Sonia Boyce includes a few disparate drawings, a video and a chronology of names tracing the exponential growth of black sisters in the music industry since Shirley Bassey.
Michael Rothenstein’s The Shooting of George Wallace conjures up images of Rauschenberg and Warhol to suggest that art should become a weapon in the civil rights struggle in the US.
His haunting images of two artist’s easels resemble Warhol’s large prints of the electric chair and provide a chilling reminder of the US judicial killing system.
Richard Bilingham is represented by another striking image of his alcoholic father. Slumped in a chair looking away from the camera he appears to have two choices – a bottle or a neatly arranged pile of bread.
Ironically, one of the most compelling visual images is provided by Art and Language, the organisation in the late 1960s which believed an image could be understood without a patronising text.
Chad McCall is another textual artist. His poster, People Taking Turns to do Difficult Jobs, suggests a utopian dream of a state where people willingly work as a collective. Other less obvious works include Clara Klinghoffer’s portrait of a child, David Azuz’s painting of a barman and a rather stiff naturalistic portrait of a woman at a window by Emmanuel Levy.
The exhibition is well worth a visit, since commercial galleries rarely take on issues, never mind campaigning against racism. Something we might all remember in the current hysteria over immigration.
Radical and Modest – Work, Leisure and the Everyday runs at the gallery in Boundary Road, St John’s Wood, until May 22. For details, call 020 7604 3991.