Franklyn Rodgers is an award-winning artist whose practice centres on evolving, innovative approaches to re-examining the portrait in contemporary visual culture. He has been described by Professor Stuart Hall as part of a generation of artists who redefined the idea of Black British representation at a critical moment in the struggle for cultural identity. Rodgers’ images challenge the language of the portrait and its function outside of familiar euro-centric frames of reference. His work not only investigates narrative, content and context, but how, through strategic placement, images contribute to opening new dialogues, reshaping how we may better connect to the value of representation and personal empowerment, whether participant or viewer.

Rodgers’ work has been shown at Somerset House’s landmark exhibition, ‘Get Up, Stand Up Now’ (2019), Autograph ABP for the solo exhibition, ‘Franklyn Rodgers: A Portrait of Loretta’ (2018). His work is held in the permanent collections of Autograph ABP, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain and the Wellcome Collection.

For the project, Underexposed, initiated in 2008 with Actor, Fraser James, Franklyn Rodgers’ created portraits of thirty Black British Actors. The portraits have been displayed in the public sphere for over a decade and in 2019 were installed in the windows of Mountview Academy of Performing Arts in Peckham. In 2020 the Portraits were exhibited in Oxford Circus for W1 Curates. In 2020 Franklyn Rodgers and Fraser James established the charity Underexposed Arts to celebrate Black British, dual heritage African/Caribbean and culturally diverse talent.

The Art360 Programme has focused on the preservation and continued legacy of the Underexposed Project through recorded interviews with local residents, businesses and communities, who have engaged with the portraits in Peckham over thirteen years, the evolution of Underexposed into a charitable entity leading on new projects and other practical interventions in the archive.