Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey

Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, is an atlas of capacious faith. Jonathan Evens explores her inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white portrait of a young woman's head against a dark textured background.

www.corinnebaileyrae.com.

Black Rainbows is the latest album from multi award-winning singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae. Part of a project which also includes a book Reflections/Refractions at the Arts Bank photographed by Koto Bolofo, live performances, visuals, lectures, exhibitions and more, the album is inspired by the objects and artworks collected by artist, archivist and curator Theaster Gates at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. Bailey Rae attended The Black Artists Retreat there in 2017 and performed in the space. Last year Bailey Rae performed in Black Chapel, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Gates. A shared element of their collaborations, work and inspirations are their Baptist upbringings and experiences.

Black Rainbows represents a significant development in Bailey Rae's music and career. By turns angry and reflective, noisy and still, celebratory and keening, original and grounded, the album broadens her musical palette considerably through a marvellous melange of electronica, jazz and punk meshed with soul and R&B. The album ranges from righteous railing against the casual erasure of Black lives and memories to a vision of a world in which we dig our gardens and live, find work and time to dance, in a new utopia. It also extends Bailey Rae’s exploration of and engagement with black history and culture beyond her own experience, through collaborations with Gates and also the Stony Island Arts Bank, which was her inspiration for the album. Her longing, shared in ‘A Spell, a Prayer’, is to arc an arm through history in order to unpick every thread.

Bailey Rae has spoken of the way in which her visit in 2017 to the Stony Island Arts Bank at the invitation of Gates, its founder, transformed her.

“I knew when I walked through those doors that my life had changed forever.”

Two things changed. One was a deeper engagement with the Stony Island Arts Bank's basic premise that black people matter, black spaces matter and black objects matter. The other was developing the confidence, through the example of Gates as artist, lecturer, potter, choir director, business owner, to, as she has said in an interview for Wilful Publicity, just:

"be myself and follow all of my interests and allow all my fascinations and obsessions to come through in my music in the belief that we are all people, and we all have those connections and questions and interests."

Christian Viveros-Faune has written that Gates developed his practice as "an artist-curator-activist", serving "different kinds of communities as an artistic ‘bridge’," out of engagement with the Church, having been both Director of Chicago’s New Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church Choir and "an urbanist in Seattle for a Christian mission that ran a housing programme in poor neighbourhoods.” His artistic projects have included processing a 250-person gospel choir he assembled from local churches through the galleries of the Milwaukee Art Museum while singing hymns Gates had scored as a response to poems written by the slave-era potter Dave Drake. The musical offerings of Gates' house band, the Black Monks of Mississippi, also combine spirituals with Zen chants. The Black Monks of Mississippi performed in Black Chapel, as also did Bailey Rae.

His entrepreneurial projects have included the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative which consists of 32 units made for those who receive affordable and low-income housing support with a space for theatre and dance, and a mission is to share culture first with the folk residing in the 32 units. Similarly, the bank at 68th and Stony Island was once a vibrant community savings and loan bank but today, through Gates’ intervention, provides the South Side of Chicago with 17,000 square feet of space for innovation in contemporary art and archival practice.

Surprisingly, the kind of faith-informed arts-and-community-connecting entrepreneurship practised by Gates, is not unknown to Bailey Rae through her own background. As a member of Moortown Baptist Church, she was part of Revive, a fresh expression of Church begun by then Youth Pastor Simon Hall. Bailey Rae has said that Hall encouraged the young people in Revive to write their own songs, provided a first guitar for her, and encouraged her to develop a "capacious faith." Her first recordings were on the Revive albums Beautiful Day and Neither Work nor Leisure. Under Halls' leadership, Revive has become a church for people who like Jesus but aren't too sure about church. He has also developed Left Bank as a community arts venue (of which Bailey Rae is a patron) in a disused Anglican church, whilst also setting up The Wren Bakery, a social enterprise using baking and barista training as tools to help women build self-belief and gain transferable skills for employment, and Queer Church Leeds, a community which celebrates LGBTQ+ people and aims to create a safe and open space for both fellowship and discussion.

Bailey Rae has shared her own exploration of faith in her music through songs such as 'I Would Like to Call It Beauty,' ‘Walk On’ and 'The Skies Will Break' and has done so in relation to both grief and celebration. Steve Stockman writes of one such song:

“Love’s On Its Way is a prayer. It begins “Oh Father”, confesses misunderstanding at the great mysteries, looks at the state of the world and then after more confession asks that her response to this world would not be just the prayer but the action of her life."

Black Rainbows ends with a stunningly beautiful track 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' inspired by a book in the Stony Island Arts Bank about the rock churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia; ancient churches hewn from rock. In an interview with Forbes magazine, Bailey Rae said:

"On one of the pages of this book, it said, it was a picture of a throne that had been made. So it was carved into the wall, solid stone wall. There was a throne and this is where God was meant to sit when God was in the temple. But I really loved that line, the Throne to the invisible God. I thought, before the throne of the invisible God, what else is there to do but kneel? What is the invisible God? What is the thing, the reason, the way we get here, the how, the why, the infinite, the eternal, the thing that makes us all connected?"

This is where Black Rainbows ends. Through its tracks, Bailey Rae takes us on a journey from the rock hewn churches of Ethiopia, to the journeys of Black Pioneers Westward, from Miss New York Transit 1957, to how the sunset appears from Harriet Jacobs' loophole, in order to explore Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse and ancestors, the erasure of Black childhood and music as a vessel for transcendence. Yet, 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' is where her energised and empathetic, wracked and anguished, celebratory and creative journey through Black history and the continuing legacy of racism finds its resolution. In a place not of simple submission, but of living the questions raised by a capacious faith where responses to prayer are both the actions of life and also the explorations found on this album.

Review

Art

Culture

4 September 2025

5 min read

Genesis Tramaine: the painter whose faces catch the spirit

New York's expressionist devotional artist

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

AN experessionist painting shows a face with a large open smile and many eyes.

Oh! Ye’ Faithful, 2024

Almine Rech.

Genesis Tramaine begins her presentation as part of the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025 by singing ‘Amen’, a gospel song popularised by The Impressions in the 1960s. Her presentation about her art is essentially an act of testimony, such as might be given in a Southern Baptist Church in the USA.

Tramaine is an expressionist devotional painter from the US who is deeply inspired by biblical texts and whose work is held in permanent collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The large expressionist heads she paints are not representational portraits but expressions of spiritual energies and forces within the person, often inspired by and showing biblical figures and saints, as well as church people, family and friends.

She speaks about having met the Gospel before meeting God, as she attended a strict Southern Baptist Church while growing up. She drew from the back of the church and also wrote thoughts and impressions in notebooks. She says that she loved church but that it fell out of place in her life as she grew up.

One day, far from home and needing help, she called her Nana on the phone, who said to seek first the kingdom of God. She found quiet in herself and prayed more, finding herself in conversation with herself. On one occasion, disturbed, she couldn't sleep and was experiencing physical manifestations. At this time, she says, she saw all of herself and surrendered to God. In the morning, she read Matthew’s Gospel - seek ye first the kingdom of God.

The words in the Bible started to make sense to her as a story reading itself to her and she began drawing faces. Her Bible had white images of Christ and Mary, so the words didn't match the images, and this was a spur to paint the women and children of the Bible revealing the beauty of black women in particular. She read the Bible in the King James Version, stopped trying to fit in and found the strength to play with and disrupt narratives. The tools and materials to do this were all one’s that she found in the Bible.

Eyes are our organ of vision, so faces sporting dozens of eyes are those which, like the saints, achieve the greatest insight into the true depths of reality.

Her current exhibition at the Consortium Museum, Dijon, France, is entitled Facing Giants’ and addresses these issues head-on. She has said of the exhibition: ‘I think it’s important that you paint a real narrative, an honest reflection. I don’t think [my saints] look like saints as they have been given to us...[those] were false narratives. The images of saints that we know and that are projected at us are all white with blond hair—and we all know that that is not true.’

She has explained that: ‘These are biblical saints who have faced giants whether those giants are actual giants or giants like fear, love, acceptance or non-acceptance, the giants of facing God and not being accepted, giants of judgments… those who have sat in the mud, if you would, and found a way to persevere. And I wanted to spend as much time as I could with those energies and those narratives, as a tool of self-encouragement and as a tool of encouragement for others.’ She feels these energies literally, speaking of entering the room where she paints with a sense of a whole other people - silent saints – being present with her when she is at the canvas.

While Tramaine emphasises the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in her work, critics have noted her stylistic closeness to graffiti art and she herself has explained that she was familiar with graffiti in her childhood in Brooklyn. Eric Troncy, Director of the Consortium Museum, relates her work stylistically to the expressionism of George Condo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Willem de Kooning. Tramaine, though, speaks of other influences including Sister Gertrude Morgan, Romare Bearden, and David Hammond. In the McDonald Agape Lecture, she spoke of Hilma af Klimt and Jack Whitten as inspirations, as well as gaining inspiration from the significance of the Iyoba Idia of Benin in Nigerian culture.

One of the distinctive features of Tramaine’s portraits is the plethora of eyes that often feature. Eyes are our organ of vision, so faces sporting dozens of eyes are those which, like the saints, achieve the greatest insight into the true depths of reality. Some more recent images have also featured a plethora of open mouths and teeth. Troncy writes that: ‘Her figures, it seems, have started to smile. To shout, perhaps; to sing—why not?; and to talk—most definitely.’

This is interesting, in part because, when I asked her in an earlier interview about her influences, she began by speaking about her love of gospel music, including that of Jonathan McReynolds and Le’Andria Johnson. She says this Jesus focused music ‘encourages me to praise from the depth of my soul; to paint, let go and trust from that space’. While she’s ‘not quite sure what happens’ then, ‘Black folk say I catch the spirit’. She speaks of losing time as you paint, saying that you can't be present when painting as you have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space.

This is, in part, why she began her McDonald Agape Lecture presentation by singing.

Her testimony is essentially simple, direct and profound: ‘I've wanted to be an artist since I was a child. I took my prayers seriously, which means I began to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior … I asked God if I could paint and pray, help and give, as an offering of service for the rest of my life. And the paintings began to mature. I committed to the relationship that painting offers spiritually, in Jesus’ name.’

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now