Annual Report 2022–2023 No. 53
PMC Staff List Director (to 17 March 2023) Mark Hallett
Events Assistant (to 13 April 2023) Danielle Convey
Deputy Director (to 16 March 2023) Acting Director (from 17 March to 30 June 2023) Sarah Victoria Turner
Events Manager (to 30 April 2023) Events Lead (from 1 May 2023) Ella Fleming
Chief Financial Officer Sarah Ruddick
Librarian Emma Floyd
British Art Network Convenor (to 30 June 2022) Head of Grants, Fellowships & Networks (from 1 July 2022) Martin Myrone
Digital Preservation & Records Manager (from 5 September 2022) Pawel Jaskulski
Head of Research & Learning Sria Chatterjee Learning Programme Manager (to 4 November 2022) Nermin Abdulla Assistant Librarian (from 12 December 2022) Gaetano Ardito Learning Programme Coordinator (to 2 November 2022) Learning Programme Manager (Acting) (from 3 November 2022 to 5 February 2023) Learning Programme Coordinator (from 6 February 2023) Esme Boggis PMC Networks Coordinator and Director’s Assistant (to 4 October 2022) Networks Manager (from 5 October 2022) Bryony Botwright-Rance Archivist, Records & Data Protection Manager Charlotte Brunskill Senior Editor Baillie Card Grants & Fellowships Manager (Parental Leave Cover) (from 8 August 2022) Gareth Clayton
Archives & Library Assistant (Graduate Trainee) (from 1 July 2022) Hannah Jones Operations Coordinator Stephanie Jorgensen Senior Editor Emily Lees Digital & Marketing Assistant (Graduate Trainee) (from 5 September 2022) Shai Mitchell Audio Visual Technician (from 2 November 2022) Doug Palfreeman Operations Manager (to 30 June 2022) Operations Lead (from 1 July 2022) Suzannah Pearson Receptionist Karen Pilz Senior Research Fellow Martin Postle
Digital Producer (to 30 June 2022) Digital Marketing Manager (from 1 July 2022) Alice Read Picture Researcher Maisoon Rehani Human Resources Officer (from 26 September 2022) Gabriella Rhodes Assistant Archivist Morwenna Roche Finance & Administration Officer Barbara Ruddick Digital Lead Tom Scutt Operations Lead (Parental Leave Cover) (from 10 August 2022) Guy Smith Grants & Fellowships Manager Harriet Sweet Networks Administrator (from 6 March 2023) Anthony Tino Finance Officer Marianette Violeta Executive Personal Assistant to the Directory & Deputy Director (from 1 November 2022) Victoria Walker Human Resources Manager Barbara Waugh Finance Manager (from 1 January 2023) Donna Witter
Editorial Assistant (to 30 June 2022) Assistant Editor (from 1 July 2022) Tom Powell Learning Programme Manager (from 6 February 2023) Rachel Prosser
James Gillray, The Progress of Man (detail), 1800, etching, 326 x 255 mm. Andrew Edmunds
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Contents
3
Introduction
6
Academic Activities
15
Print Publications
18
British Art Studies
22
Grants and Fellowships
31
Learning Programme
36
Archives and Library
42
Networks
48
Special Projects
52
Staff Research Activities
1
2
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Introduction
Since its foundation in 1970, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art has had five directors, and this financial year saw the departure of Mark Hallett, after almost eleven years leading the organisation. Mark’s tenure as director was one of innovation and expansion, seeing the organisation grow from a team of twelve to thirty-eight members who support the Centre’s work to enhance and expand the field of British art studies. I have great pleasure in submitting the fifty-third Annual Report of the Paul Mellon Centre and take this opportunity to thank Mark for his incredible service, hard work and vision that has shaped new directions for our work and that of the field more broadly. Mark takes up the role of Märit Rausing Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and all who are connected with the PMC, the Yale Center for British Art and Yale University wish him well in his new post. In the period following his departure, I moved from the position of Deputy Director to that of Acting Director, and now have the tremendous honour of serving as the Centre’s sixth Director. This year can be characterised as one of change for the PMC, not only at leadership level but across the team. We have welcomed a large number of new employees and created several new roles. Indicative of the Centre’s ambitions to provide world-class research services and facilities, and as a result of a strategic review of the Centre in the previous year, which highlighted several staffing gaps, we have been extremely fortunate to be able to introduce new jobs and revise some more established ones. This ensures that the Centre is operationally robust and invigorated by new ideas, experiences and energies. We bid farewell to Nermin Abdulla after twelve years at the Centre. From arriving to work on reception, Nermin developed the Centre’s Learning Programme. At the core of this was her work on the Yale in London programme, which over time grew to encompass a broad remit including the Write on Art Prize; the Plan, Prepare, Provide scheme; and the establishment of the Public Lecture (now Public Event) Series. Rachel Prosser joined us from the UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as our new Learning Programme Manager. She is supported by Esme Boggis in the new role of Learning Programme Coordinator. The Archives & Library team has been joined by a new Assistant Librarian, Gaetano Ardito, who was previously
British Art Network Curatorial Forum, October 2022, New Haven
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Introduc tion
Assistant Librarian at the British Museum. Pawel Jaskulski, Digital Preservation & Records Manager, is currently creating a digital assets register and advising the Centre on its Digital Preservation policy and strategy. As an institution that champions the preservation of records for research purposes, understanding how we do this in a digital age and for an image-rich discipline is a complex and exciting project for the Centre to engage with. Other new roles created at the Centre in this financial year include an Audio Visual Technician, Executive Assistant to the Director, Finance Manager, Human Resources Officer, Networks Administrator, Networks Manager and Receptionist. The Operations and Events Manager roles were reassessed in line with the work they perform across the organisation and redesignated as ‘Leads’ for their teams. Two new graduate trainee roles – an Archives & Library Assistant and a Digital & Marketing Assistant – have been designed to provide career pathways with a rigorous schedule of training and skills acquisitions. We have been so impressed by the contribution that the first incumbents of these roles, Hannah Jones and Shai Mitchell, have made to the work of the Centre. It is a privilege to lead such a talented team of people who are committed to developing British art studies for the future and ensuring that the Centre provides sectorleading facilities and services for its users. The Centre is well equipped, both financially and structurally, to carry out the vision set out by Paul Mellon to improve knowledge about, and access to, British art. We look to the future with confidence and optimism about the wider cultural and societal value of our work and the support we can offer to individuals and institutions in these challenging times. The field of British art has changed considerably since the PMC’s foundation, both in terms of the range of subjects and those who interact with our work as researchers and audiences. A glance down the list of grants and fellowships awarded in this financial year gives a sense of this. A key area of ongoing work at the Centre is implementing the objectives set out in our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion action plan, including assessing and improving access to our resources, spaces and activities. This financial year we embarked on a major research project, supported by The Audience Agency, to collect data about our audiences and 4
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
workforce. The results will be reported on in future work as we analyse the data to understand the demographics the PMC reaches through its activities. There has been much to celebrate this year. The return of the Yale in London undergraduate students to classes in the Centre’s premises – after a hiatus during the pandemic – has brought a different energy (and noise!) level to our stairwells. The British Art Network marked ten years of activities, and has seen impressive growth of its membership in recent years. No fewer than nine of our recently published titles were awarded major prizes, including Apollo magazine’s ‘Book of the Year’. This is testament to the quality of the scholarship and the editorial experience and production values that result in publications that will have an impact on the field for years to come. Sarah Victoria Turner Director
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Academic Activities
The Paul Mellon Centre’s academic events programme offers an intellectually varied platform showcasing new research in the field of British art and its complex histories. Collaboration with individuals and institutions enables us to shape a dynamic research culture through events that take place in Bedford Square, online and at external venues. In the Autumn term of 2022, the evening Research Seminars presented new work from scholars on a broad range of topics. Speakers included Alexander Marr, Mark Crinson, Greg Smith and Karin Zitzewitz. All evening seminars are now live-streamed and accessible to an in-person audience in London as well as a lively global community of online attendees. The Spring edition took the form of a series of dialogues between two researchers highlighting some of the most pressing questions for our field. Research Lunch Seminars at the Paul Mellon Centre continue to be much loved and well attended. They provide a space for dialogue and for early career and senior scholars to present work in progress and receive feedback from an audience of experts as well as a general audience. Topics in Autumn 2022 included the Anglo-Dutch empire and visual culture in the Atlantic world, the works of Ithell Colquhoun, and architectural science and the history of architecture, to name a few. With Tate Liverpool, the Centre organised the conference Finding Common Ground: Making the Landscape Radical in July 2022. Imagined as an extension of the Radical Landscapes exhibition, the symposium provided a space to dig deeper into the histories and futures of the rural. In December 2022, the Centre held an online international workshop on ‘Mass Data Methodologies’, which asked how artistic populations represent or intersect with the larger political entities – community, class, nation. Also in December, the Centre organised with Stephen Daniels the conference Rereading Constable: Letters, Life and Art. Speakers focused on a single letter that opened up new questions and arguments about John Constable’s life, practice and identity as a painter, and about the wider artistic, literary, religious and political cultures of his era. These are just some details from the busy programme in 2022–23. 6
James Forbes, The Large Mazagon Mango (detail), illustration from A Voyage from England to Bombay with Descriptions in Asia, Africa, and South America, 1765–1800 by James Forbes, Vol. II, plate 127. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts (MSS 66)
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Academic Activities July 2022–June 2023
Autumn Research Seminar Series 2022 5 October Greg Smith (Senior Research Fellow, PMC), ‘Rethinking the Artist Catalogue for the Online Age: Thomas Girtin 1775–1800’ 19 October Mark Crinson (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Heathrow’s Genius Locus’ 16 November Alexander Marr (University of Cambridge), ‘Holbein’s Wit’ 7 December Karin Zitzewitz (Michigan State University), ‘Infrastructures of Thought, Networks of Practice: Indian Feminist Art in and with Britain in the 1990s’ Autumn Research Lunch Series 2022 7 October Hans C. Hönes (University of Aberdeen), ‘Art History in Britain: A Scottish Innovation’ 14 October Dawn Pereira (Terra Foundation for American Art/PMC Fellowship 202021), ‘Beyond William Mitchell’s British “Colourful Crusade”; Creating Art for the Urban Landscapes of the United States (1972–77)’ 28 October Jake Subryan Richards (LSE), ‘Anglo-Dutch Empire and Visual Culture in the Atlantic World’ 11 November Jacqui McIntosh (Independent scholar), ‘The Energetic Line: The Works on Paper of Ithell Colquhoun’
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25 November Dean Hawkes (Emeritus Professor of Architectural Design, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University/Emeritus Fellow, Darwin College, University of Cambridge), ‘Architecture and the Climate of England: Architectural Science and the History of Architecture’ Autumn Conferences 2022 2 December: Rereading Constable: Letters, Life and Art Conference A one-day conference at the Paul Mellon Centre and online. Organised as part of the PMC’s Generation Landscape research project and convened by Stephen Daniels and Mark Hallett. Session 1: Chair: Stephen Daniels (University of Nottingham) Alexandra Harris (University of Birmingham), ‘New Friends, New Scenes: Constable in the Arun Valley’ Amy Concannon (University of York and Tate Britain), ‘Strengthening Ties and Gaining Esteem: Constable Writes to Wordsworth, 15 June, 1836’ Session 2: Chair: Martin Postle (PMC) Emma Roodhouse (Art Curator and Researcher), ‘An Evening’s Amusement: Portraits, Writing and Other Oddments from the Mason Family Album’ Sarah Cove (Constable Research Project), ‘A Regency “Nip-and-Tuck”: Constable’s Treslove Portraits Rediscovered’
Session 3: Chair: Mark Hallett (PMC) Morna O’Neill (Wake Forest University), ‘John Constable, David Lucas, and Artistic Identity’ Katharine Martin (V&A and the University of Sussex), ‘Translations and Fraught Relations: English Landscape and the Language of Collaboration’ Session 4: Chair: Sarah Victoria Turner (PMC) Gillian Forrester (Independent scholar), ‘“Solemnity, Not Gaiety”: Language and the Production of Meaning in Constable’s English Landscape Scenery’ Elenor Ling (Fitzwilliam Museum), ‘The “Definition of our Book”: John Constable, David Lucas and their English Landscape’ Session 5: Chair: Sria Chatterjee (PMC) Rhian Addison McCreanor (University of York and Tate Britain), ‘Repairing the House with a Thorough Painting: Reimagining 63 Charlotte Street’ Nicholas Robbins (University College London), ‘The Life Academy and the Origins of Landscape’ Panel Discussion: Stephen Daniels, Martin Myrone, Trev Broughton and Timothy Wilcox 9 December 2022: Mass Data Methodologies Workshop An online workshop exploring mass data and its impact on art history and visual studies.
Charles Joseph Faulkner after Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Buy from Us with a Golden Curl, wood engraving, 15 × 9.9 cm, frontispiece to Goblin Market and other Poems by Christina Rossetti (Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.), 1862. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
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Academic Ac ti vities
Panel 1: Chair: Martin Myrone (PMC)
Spring Research Seminar Series 2023
Spring Conferences 2023
Anita Gowers (Art History PhD candidate, Australian National University) and Paul Wilson (Independent scholar), ‘Why Art History Needs Data Science’
11 January Holly Shaffer (Brown University) and Sussan Babaie (Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Food and the Senses’
21–22 April: (M)otherhood: Art and Life Conference
Shane Morrissy (Art, Art History, and Visual Studies PhD candidate, Duke University), ‘Digital Humanities as a Fundamental Methodological Approach: A Case Study of the Postcard Craze’ Hannah Jacobs (Duke University’s Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab), Paul Jaskot (Duke University) and Lee Sorensen (Founder and co-editor of the Dictionary of Art Historians), ‘The Dictionary of Art Historians: Studying Art History at Scale’ Panel 2: Chair: Baillie Card (PMC) Rhian Addison McCreanor (AHRC collaborative PhD student between the University of York and Tate Britain), ‘Indoor Spaces for Outdoor Minds: Landscape Artists’ Studios in London, 1780–1850’ Ming Tiampo (Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, Carleton University), Pansee Abou Elatta (Visual artist, curator and researcher), Janneke Van Hoeve (Carleton University) and Maribel Urbaneja (Worlding Public Cultures Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Chelsea College of Arts at the University of the Arts London), ‘Mobile Subjects, Contrapuntal Modernisms’ Mary Okin (PhD Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara and a Lecturer at San Jose State University), ‘Challenging the American Art Canon with Mass Data: Mining @ Tenth Street: Visualizing New York City’s Tenth Street Studio Building’ Hans Hönes (University of Aberdeen), Contribution
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8 February Erica Carter (King’s College London) and Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (University College London), ‘Cinema and Empire: Technologies and Practices’ 1 March Robbie Richardson (Princeton University) and Ruth B. Philips (Carleton University), ‘Indigenous Objects Abroad’ 22 March Iris Moon (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Rachel Silberstein (University of Florida), ‘Feminist Revisions of Chinoiserie’ 29 March Maya Indira Ganesh (Senior Research Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge) and Anthony Downey (Birmingham City University), ‘Neo-Colonial Visions: Artificial Intelligence and Epistemic Violence’ Spring Research Lunch Series 2023 20 January Alina Khakoo (University of Cambridge), Bazaar: South Asian Arts Magazine (1987–92)’
A two-day seminar in collaboration with Tate St Ives inspired by the major exhibition and publication Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life, this event focused on under-represented perspectives on motherhood to consider how this might affect the making and understanding of artworks. 21 April Introduction and Welcome: Sria Chatterjee and Sarah Victoria Turner (PMC)/ Katy Norris (Tate Curator) and Melanie Stidolph (Artist) Keynote Talk: Hettie Judah (Chief art critic, The i), ‘Babs: Re-Complicating Artist Mother Narratives’ 22 April Introduction and Welcome: Melanie Stidolph (Independent artist) and Katy Norris (Tate Curator) Lucy Willow (Artist), ‘The Last Portrait’ Holly Slingsby (Visual artist), ‘Unheard Songs’ Melanie Stidolph (Artist), ‘The Next Dawn, the Next Spring’
10 February Dominic Bate (Brown University), ‘Pythagorean Visions: Picturing Harmony in British Art, 1719–1753’
In Conversation: hosted by Sophie J. Williamson (Programme Curator, Exhibitions, Camden Arts Centre, London)
24 February Avantika Kumar (Harvard University), ‘Between Book and Body: Art, Language and the Limits of Interpretation in the Manuscripts of the English Benedictine Movement’
Kerri ní Dochartaigh (Northern Irish writer), ‘Fog and Milk and Glass etc.’
10 March Deepthi Bathala (University of Michigan), ‘ Plantation Failures, Famine Crops and Contesting Tropicality: Trials of the Calcutta Botanic Garden in the Early Nineteenth Century’
Pragya Agarwal (Behaviour and data scientist and Visiting Professor of Social Inequities and Injustice, Loughborough University), ‘The Otherhood in Motherhood’ Katy Norris (Tate Curator), ‘Hepworth, Motherhood and Loss’ Jody Day (Founder of Gateway Women), ‘The Presence of Absence’
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Other 8 March 2023 Paul Mellon Centre Book Night A celebration of a series of prizewinning titles recently published by the PMC. Short talks about each book and the research behind it were followed by a Q&A. Adriano Aymonino, Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland Henrietta McBurney, Illuminating Natural History: The Art and Science of Mark Catesby Kyle Leyden on Mark Girouard, Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540–1640 Manolo Guerci, London’s ‘Golden Mile’: The Great Houses of the Strand, 1550–1650 Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries 29 March 2023: Entangled Histories Curatorial Workshop The forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition, Entangled Pasts, 1768– Now: Art, Colonialism and Change (Spring 2024) will consider themes of colonialism, enslavement, resistance, abolition and indenture within British imperial contexts from the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the present day. A group of critical friends were invited to the workshop to share feedback and their own experiences to help anticipate and think through possible receptions of the exhibition. Dorothy Price (Courtauld Institute of Art, with curatorial team), Presentation of exhibition and discussion of curatorial principles
Sarah Lea (Royal Academy of Arts), Public positioning: feedback and experiences Sarah Lea and Rose Thompson (Royal Academy of Arts), Interpretation strategies: voices, questions, quotations, programming Climate & Colonialism Research Project Events 2023 27 January: Synthetic Histories: Plastics, Climate and Colonialism Conference
Charlotte Matter (Institute of Art History, University of Zurich), ‘The Personal is Political: Toxic Materials in Art’ Chair: Jessica Varner (University of Southern California) Hoyee Tse (Royal College of Art), ‘Plastic Prosperity in a Growing Hong Kong’ Amy Woodson-Boulton (Loyola Marymount University), ‘Design Plasticity Before Plastic: Victorian Substitutions’, ‘Truth to Materials’ and the ‘Deceptions of Cheapness’ (online)
This symposium, held jointly by the PMC and V&A Dundee, explored the complex past, problematic present and possible futures of plastic, in the context of V&A Dundee's exhibition, Plastic: Remaking our World and the PMC’s Climate & Colonialism project.
In Conversation: Nanjala Nyabola (Writer, researcher, political analyst) and Laurie Bassam (Assistant Curator, V&A)
Introduction and Welcome: Charlotte Hale (V&A) and Sria Chatterjee (PMC)
Compound 13 Lab members: Graham Jeffery (University of the West of Scotland), Ben Parry (Bath Spa University), Vidya Sagar Pancholi and Sharmila Samant, ‘Rethinking Waste Plastic’
Chair: Nichol Keene (V&A) Heather Davis (The New School), ‘Inheritance, Transmission and Barricade’ Alia Farid (Artist), ‘In Lieu of What Was/ In Lieu of What Is’ Chair: Sria Chatterjee (PMC) Max Liboiron (Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador), online, and Alice Mah (University of Warwick), ‘Pollution is Colonialism’ In Conversation: Max Liboiron and Alice Mah Chair: Jessica Varner (University of Southern California) Elizabeth Darling (Oxford Brookes University), ‘The Complex Life of the Bakelite Wireless Set’
In Conversation: Heather Davis (Assistant Professor of Culture and Media, The New School) and Sarah Rose (Artist)
Reading Group The Climate & Colonialism interdisciplinary reading group aims to provide space for discussion and reflection about the role of the arts and visual cultures in discourses around climate and colonialism. 23 February Climate & Colonialism Reading Group, Launch event 27 April Climate & Colonialism Reading Group, Thinking with Animals 21 June Climate & Colonialism Reading Group, Thinking with Ice
Alexander Davidson (Arts writer and lecturer), ‘A Climatic and Colonial History of Architectural Plastics (1948–85)’
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Academic Ac ti vities
Summer Research Seminar Series 2023 Architecture Summer Series A series of talks and discussions showcasing new research and approaches to thinking about buildings, cities, and landscapes in Britain and elsewhere, co-convened with Rixt Woudstra (University of Amsterdam). 17 May Adedoyin Teriba (Dartmouth College), ‘History Designing Architecture: Performance and Architecture in Africa and its Diaspora’. Respondent: Rixt Woudstra 24 May Jiat-Hwee Chang (National University of Singapore), ‘Thermal Governance: Air-Conditioning Complexes and Climate Modulation in Urban Asia’. Respondent: Kim Förster (University of Manchester) 31 May Moa Carlsson (University of Edinburgh), ‘Landscapes of Waste: Towards an Urban History of Coal Spoil in Modern Britain’. Respondent: Otto Saumarez Smith (University of Warwick) 7 June David Gissen (Parsons/The New School), ‘The Architecture of Disability’. Respondent: Jos Boys (Architect, activist, educator and writer) 14 June Swati Chattopadhyay (University of California, Santa Barbara), ‘The Small Spaces of Empire’. Respondent: Tania Sengupta (Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London) Summer Research Lunch Series 2023 5 May Fionn Montell-Boyd (University of Oxford), ‘Manufacturing Pictures: Photographic Experimentation at the End of the Eighteenth Century’ 19 May Alex Solovyev (University of Oxford), ‘A Glaswegian in Troy: William Simpson’s vision of Western Anatolia’
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2 June Kylie Gilchrist (University of Manchester), ‘Revisiting Rasheed Araeen’s Structures: 8bS at “Manufactured Art”, 1970' 16 June Lily Evans-Hill (Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Framing a Slide Registry: The Origins of the Women Artists Slide Library’ 30 June Cecilia Neil-Smith (University of Exeter), ‘A Fishy Tale: The Mermaids and Sirens of Edward Burne-Jones’ Summer Conference 2023 15–16 June: The Rossettis: In Relation Conference A two-day conference in a collaboration between Tate Britain, the Paul Mellon Centre and the History of Art Department at the University of York. 15 June Welcome: Sarah Victoria Turner (PMC) and Carol Jacobi (Tate Britain) Panel 1: Methodologies
Jennifer Rabedeau (PhD candidate, Cornell University), ‘Pre-Raphaelite Women in Relation’ Gallery Talks Debbie Hicks (University of Oxford), ‘The Model Paints Back: Marie Spartali’s Reformation of Rossettian Aesthetics’ Suzanne Fagence (Writer, curator, broadcaster), ‘“Shall I Find Comfort?”: Jane Morris and the Rossettis’ Megan Williams (University of Surrey), ‘Helen and Olivia Rossetti: Art and Anarchy’ Helen Bratt-Wyton (National Trust), ‘Rossetti, Pre the Pre-Raphaelites’ Mark Samuels Lasner (University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press), ‘The Lock of Elizabeth Siddal’s Hair’ Amy Griffin and Gabriella Macaro (Tate), ‘A New View of Rossetti’s Technique, Dilettante or Workaholic?’
Chair: Liz Prettejohn (University of York)
16 June
Natalie Prizel (Independent scholar), ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Race Relations’
Panel 3: Close Reading
Imogen Hart (Independent scholar), ‘Dorothy Walker and May Morris in Relation’ Kimberly Rhodes (Drew University), ’Shakespeare’s Sisters: Sororal Subterfuge and Pre-Raphaelite Identity’ Panel 2: Relationships Chair: Sarah Victoria Turner (PMC) Glenda Youde (University of York), ‘A Complex Relationship: Gabriel, Christina and Elizabeth Rossetti’ Wendy Parkins (University of Otago, New Zealand) ‘“I Never Quite Gave Myself”: Pre-Raphaelite Women and Gifts of Creative Exchange’
Chair: Nicholas Dunn-McAfee (University of York) Thomas Hughes (Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata (1873) in Relation to Christina Rossetti’ Marte Stinis (University of York and the Netherlands Institute for Art History), ‘Love and Longing: Intermedial Relationships Between Painting and Music in the 1850s’ Roisin Neenan (PhD student, University of St Andrews), ‘“Absorption is Not Annihilation”: Kisses and Originality in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poetry and Art’
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Panel 4: Labour(ing) and Art(work) Chair: Tim Barringer (Yale University) Deborah Lam (University of Bristol), ‘Hard Work, Soft Work: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Effort in Relation’ Frances Varley (Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Making Meaning in Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel at the Manchester Art Museum’ Tara Contractor (Philadelphia Museum of Art), ‘“The Little Sister Art”: The Rossettis and the Illumination Revival’ Panel 5: International Exchanges Chair: Eduardo De Maio (University of York) Helena Cox (Art curator at the University of York and PhD candidate in History of Art), ‘Czeching Out the Rossettis – Artistic and Literary Networks Mediating Pre-Raphaelite Art in 1900s Czech Lands’ Sophie Lynford (Delaware Art Museum), ‘The Rossettis in America’ Sadbh Kellett (University of St Andrews), ‘“Better than the Lancelot of Arthurian Legend”: Katharine Tynan, Gaelic Mythology, and the Pre-Raphaelites’ Conversation reflecting on the themes of conference and exhibition, with Carol Jacobi, Liz Prettejohn, Tim Barringer, Caitlin Meehye Beach and Sarah Victoria Turner
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Running Head
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Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Print Publications
This year’s publications offer an abundance of innovative approaches and groundbreaking research. We have been proud to see distinguished authors return to the list and delighted to welcome outstanding first projects. Many of this year’s books make important contributions to our core subject areas, while others provide exciting journeys into new territory. Portraiture emerged as a key theme this year, with a re-creation of the courtly spectacle of Van Dyck’s portrait sittings; an exploration of the eerie and sometimes shocking portrait drawings of Frank Auerbach; and a vivid study of the concept of ‘liveliness’ and its ability to move, impress and delight – in portraiture and beyond – in Tudor and Jacobean visual and material culture. Architectural history has always been an important strand of the Centre’s publishing programme, and this year we added to this with an investigation into the developments in industrial production and innovation that led to Manchester becoming the world’s first industrial city, and a study of the articulation of British global power and prestige through the medium of the Edwardian Baroque style. We also published a suite of books that examine some of the compelling and provocative ways in which art operates at moments of great change: from James Gillray’s satirical prints, which reflected and shaped an age of political and social turmoil, to the novel modes of artistic production that destabilised the political legitimacy of the East India Company; and from the eighteenth-century political revolutionaries who translated their principles into landscape design in a period of rebellion, to the ways in which the technological development of colour helped shape a national identity in twentieth-century Britain. This year we also expanded our digital ‘bookshelf’ on the Yale A&A ePortal by adding studies on eighteenth-century conversation pieces; sugar and slavery; Orientalist painting; Ford Madox Brown; and the interplay of modernism and modernity in British art before 1914. We are delighted to see these important out-of-print titles reaching wider audiences in this new format.
James Gillray, Modern-Hospitality, – or – A Friendly Party in High Life (detail), 1792, etching, 250 × 355 mm. Andrew Edmunds
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Print Publications July 2022–June 2023
Mark Crinson
Edited by Mark Hallett and Catherine Lampert
G. A. Bremner
Frank Auerbach: Drawings of People October 2022
Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, 1885–1920 November 2022
Adam Eaker
Tim Clayton
Christina J. Faraday
Van Dyck and the Making of English Portraiture September 2022
James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire November 2022
Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in PostReformation England April 2023
Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester September 2022
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Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Kirsty Sinclair Dootson
Tom Young
The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity May 2023
Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813–1858 June 2023
Finola O’Kane
Anthony van Dyck, Self-Portrait (detail), circa 1620–21, oil on canvas, 119.7 x 87.9 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Landscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688–1815 June 2023
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British Art Studies
This year saw sustained work on a redesign of the British Art Studies (BAS) journal platform. In July 2022, three BAS editors travelled to Amsterdam to kick off a collaboration with the Dutch digital design firm Fabrique. Over the next twelve months, designs were refined towards a relaunch in late 2023. During this financial year, the editors also added thematic tags to the backlist of BAS, assigning each past article tags that span categories such as century, place, topic, material, medium and style. This will enable browsing by theme, surface older content and enhance discoverability in the search function. Two issues of BAS were also published, beginning with Issue 23 (August 2022), which contains six long-form articles and one commissioned film that explores the work of the artist Jacqueline Bishop. The film focuses on a series of fifteen plates designed by Jacqueline called The Market Woman’s Story (2022), which use collage to celebrate the figure of the Jamaican market woman and critically engage with depictions of her, in a medium inspired by British ceramic manufacturers such as Wedgwood and Spode. Alongside a range of articles, Issue 24 (March 2023) also includes an archival feature by Alexandra Kokoli about the visual cultures of protest at Greenham Common Peace Camp, and a multi-author feature (convened by BAS contributing editor Edwin Coomasaru) titled ‘Monuments Must Fall’, which brings together ten responses from scholars and artists around the world on the politics of public monuments. During this time, the journal’s virtual residency programme, titled ‘Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism’, continued into its second year (running from October 2022 to October 2023), with dedicated research clinics held in July 2022 and an all-group workshop in October 2022. In March 2023, the journal also circulated an open call for a special issue titled ‘Queer Art in Britain Since the 1980s’, which will be guest-edited by a team of four scholars: Fiona Anderson (Newcastle University), Flora Dunster (Central Saint Martins), Theo Gordon (University of York) and Laura Guy (Glasgow School of Art). The call closed in May and received more than thirty proposals.
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Installation view, Jala Wahid: Conflagration, 22 October 2022–30 April 2023, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Image courtesy of Jala Wahid. Photo: Rob Harris © 2022 BALTIC (all rights reserved)
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
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Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
British Art Studies July 2022–June 2023
British Art Studies, Issue 23: August 2022
British Art Studies, Issue 24: March 2023
Cover Collaboration
Cover Collaboration
Jacqueline Bishop, ‘The Market Woman’s Story’
Jala Wahid, interviewed by Edwin Coomasaru, ‘Oil Aesthetics and Imperial Violence’
Articles Elizabeth Fisher, ‘Beauty and Revolution: Gustav Metzger’s Dialectical Aesthetics’ Luke Gartlan, ‘Inventing Provinciality: St Andrews and the Global Networks of Early Victorian Photography’ Margaret Iversen, ‘Death and the Found Object: Virginia Woolf, Lucy Skaer, and Becky Beasley’ Sophie Kelly, ‘The Black Prince, the Trinity, and the Art of Commemoration’ Wendy McGlashan, ‘Exit, Pursued by John Kay: The Staging of Graphic Satire in Late Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh’ Margaret J. Schmitz, ‘Capturing Futurity: The Artistic Exchange of Alvin Langdon Coburn and H. G. Wells’
Conversation Piece ‘Monuments Must Fall’, convened by Edwin Coomasaru Articles Kate Retford, ‘Cutting and Pasting: The Print Room at Woodhall Park’ Ariel Kline, ‘Is the Painting a Grave? John Everett Millais and the Queer Refusals of Victorian Art’ Hans C. Hönes, ‘The Rise and Fall of the “Clerks”: British Art History, 1950–1970’ Melissa L. Gustin, ‘Do Sleeping Shepherds Dream of 3D-Printed Sheep: John Gibson, Oliver Laric, and Digital Neoclassicism’ Sam Gathercole, ‘The Expressive Unit of Constructionism: Kenneth Martin at Whittington Hospital’ Animating the Archive Alexandra Kokoli, ‘Greenham Common’s Archival Webs: Towards a Virtual Feminist Museum’
Still from The Market Woman’s Story: Contemporary Ceramics by Jacqueline Bishop, 2022. Shelbourne Films, produced by Lucy Andia for British Art Studies
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Grants and Fellowships
Our funding programme supports scholarship, academic research and the dissemination of knowledge in the fields of British art and architectural history, and of British visual culture understood more broadly, from the medieval period to the present day and across relevant geographical and cultural contexts. In 2022–23, £959,974 was awarded in grants and fellowships supporting individuals and institutions across the UK and internationally. Across our 2022–23 rounds of funding, we received more than 400 applications, of which 104 were successful. We supported 36 individuals with Research Support Grants, and awarded 18 Fellowships, including Junior, PostDoctoral, Mid-Career and Senior Fellowships and the Rome Fellowship based at the British School in Rome. In line with our mission to champion new ways of understanding British art history and culture, we continued our strand of New Narratives funding, and awarded the MA/MPhil Studentship to Skye Weston to undertake an MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Doctoral Scholarship to Zoe Bromberg McCarthy for ‘Reconceiving Blackness within British Art History’ at the Courtauld, and the Early Career Fellowship to Denise Kwan for the project ‘Water as Method: Mapping the Ecology of East and Southeast Asian Artists in the UK from the 1980s to Present Day’. Our institutional support included: awards for Collaborative Projects between the Arts Council Collection and the University of Birmingham, and between the University of East Anglia and Loughborough University London; Curatorial Research Grants for Drawing Room, Museum of the Home, the V&A and Turner Contemporary; and Digital Project Grants for the University of Lincoln, Tate and Four Corners Gallery. We provided grants to support 12 events and programmes, including a public talks programme on Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s at Touchstones Rochdale to coincide with their exhibition A Tall Order!; the virtual conference Histories, Art Histories and Heritage Narratives in Eastern Africa organised by the British Academy and the University of Manchester; and a symposium titled ‘Creative Sanctuary: Dartington in the 1930s and Beyond’ planned by the Dartington Trust. Through our Publications Grants, available to publishers or authors, we supported publications on topics ranging from medieval tapestry to Queer art and club culture in the 1980s. 22
Installation view, A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s, 4 February–6 May 2023, Touchstones, Rochdale. Photo: Harry Meadley, Courtesy Touchstones Rochdale
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
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Grants and Fellowships July 2022–June 2023
Autumn 2022 At the October 2022 meeting of the Advisory Council, the following grants and fellowships were awarded: Collaborative Project Grants Arts Council Collection and the Department of Art History, University of Birmingham were awarded £20,000 towards collaborative research for the project Mapping the Collection The University of East Anglia and Loughborough University London were awarded £20,000 towards collaborative research for the project Exhibiting Oceans in the UK Today Curatorial Research Grants Drawing Room was awarded £30,401 to help support a research curator to work on the project The Time of Our Lives Museum of the Home was awarded £37,366 to help support a research curator to work on the project Homes Through Time The Royal Academy was awarded £22,287 to help support a research curator to work on the project Entangled Pasts: The Royal Academy, Enslavement and Empire
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Turner Contemporary was awarded £35,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project Resistance The Victoria and Albert Museum was awarded £30,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project Hubs, Nodes and Networks: A New History of British Digital Art Digital Project Grants University of Lincoln was awarded £20,000 towards a digital research project focused on architectural illusionistic spaces at Beverley Minster and Lincoln Cathedral, through the project Morphing Virtual Spaces: Medieval Architecture and Illusion Tate Galleries was awarded £30,000 towards the digitisation and online publication of the collage scrapbook of Alison Smithson, through the project Alison’s Mind: A Collage Scrapbook of Postcolonial Imagery on Old England Four Corners Gallery was awarded £30,000 towards the digital project focused on the Half Moon Photography Workshop’s touring exhibitions from 1976 to 1984, through the project On the Move: Digital Archive Project
Publication Grants Rosamond Allwood and North Herts Council were awarded £4,900 towards publishing Camden Town to Garden City: The Letchworth paintings of Gilman, Gore and Ratcliffe Jeffrey Auerbach was awarded £800 towards publishing William Simpson’s Underground Empire Gemma Brace and Simon Grant were awarded £3,000 towards publishing Paule Vézelay: Living Lines Clare Carolin was awarded £3,000 towards publishing The Deployment of Art: The Imperial War Museum’s Artistic Records Committee John-Joseph Charlesworth was awarded £1,800 towards publishing The Mediation of Art in Britain 1968–1976: The Critical War Alice Correia, Anjalie Dalal-Clayton and Elizabeth Robles (Editors) were awarded £3,000 towards publishing Interventions in British Art History: Critical Essays on Artists of African, Caribbean, and Asian Descent
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Mels Evers and Tate Publishing were awarded £5,000 towards publishing Church of the Poison Mind: Queer Art and Club Culture in 1980s Britain Feargal Fitzpatrick was awarded £3,000 towards publishing The Politics of the Image: Ireland, Landscape and Nineteenth-Century Photography Ann-Marie Foster was awarded £379 towards publishing Family Mourning after War and Disaster in Early Twentieth-Century Britain Daniel Fountain and Bloomsbury were awarded £3,218 towards publishing Queer Crafts: Materiality, Identity and Contemporary Practices Elisabeth Gernerd was awarded £3,000 towards publishing The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in 1770s and 1780s Atlantic World Joy Gregory and MACK were awarded £5,000 towards publishing Shining Lights Elain Harwood and Alan Powers were awarded £1,200 towards publishing Ernö Goldfinger Thomas Hughes and Emma Merkling (Editors) were awarded £1,600 towards publishing The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Ecology, Matter, Form Marcus Jack and LUX Moving Image/ LUX Scotland were awarded £5,000 towards publishing Artists' Moving Image in Scotland
David King and The Lutterworth Press were awarded £7,000 towards publishing Through a Glass Brightly Nilina Deb Lal and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland were awarded £8,000 towards publishing Building Imperial Calcutta: Making the Capital of British India, 1880–1911 Catherine Lord and No Place Press were awarded £8,000 towards publishing The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men Samia Malik and Book Works were awarded £8,000 towards publishing Women of Colour Index Reading Group Gill Perry was awarded £2,450 towards publishing Islands and Contemporary Art Abi Shapiro (Editor) with The Hepworth Wakefield, in collaboration with A Practice for Everyday Life, were awarded £10,000 towards publishing Kim Lim Andrew Saint (Editor) was awarded £381 towards publishing French Architecture and the English, 1837–1914 Amy Tobin and Yale University Press London were awarded £5,000 towards publishing Women Artists Together: Feminism, Art and Collaboration in the Age of Women’s Liberation Mark Webb was awarded £3,000 towards publishing The St Mary's Hall Tapestry, Coventry
Andrew Wyld Research Support Grants Ellen Smith was awarded £1,768 towards research travel costs for the project Artistic Maritime and Craft Cultures: Drawing and Crafting Artistic Representations of Imperial Voyages throughout the Long Nineteenth Century Alexandra Solovyev was awarded £1,185 towards research travel costs for the project William Simpson: Constructing Modernity: Visual Representations of the British Railways in Western Anatolia, 1850–1890 Research Support Grants Abigail Breeze Barrington was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Patrons and Muses: Women in the Arts, 1577–1688 James Bettley was awarded £1,474 towards costs to conduct research on English Churches on the Continent Altair Brandon-Salmon was awarded £1,981 towards costs to conduct research on the representation of East End bombsites in British post-war photography, titled Strange Worlds: London, 1940–1994 George Charman was awarded £1,994 towards costs to conduct research on the Edward James archive and his contribution to speculative sculpture and experimental architecture
Hope Wolf was awarded £3,000 towards publishing Sussex Modernism
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Grants and Fellowships
Oliver Coulson was awarded £2,000 towards costs to conduct research on angel roof sculpture and Lollard anti-sacramentalism
Michael Moore-Jones was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Connell and Ward in Modernist and Nationalist Debates
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge was awarded £1,000 to support a workshop focused on radical art in Cambridge
Lexington Davis was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Between the Kitchen and the Factory: Margaret Harrison’s ‘Homeworkers’ Project
Simon Spier was awarded £1,684 towards research costs for the project James Bandinel, Ceramics and Slavery
V&A Wedgwood Collection (Barlaston) and V&A South Kensington (London) were awarded £1,500 to support a symposium focused on the V&A Wedgwood Collection
Emily Doucet was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Kodak Created … the Empire Adopts: The Airgraph in British Visual Culture Miguel Gaete Caceres was awarded £1,710 towards research costs for the project British Artists in Valparaiso: A Survey of Artworks, Bibliographic Material and Research Resources in London, Surrey, Hull, and Glasgow Luke Gartlan was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Paper Empires: St Andrews and Early Victorian Photography Carter Jackson was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Constructing Commerce, Knowledge, and Empire: The Architecture of the Imperial Institute Holly Marsden was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Archival Research in the Netherlands for ‘The Multiple Identities of Queen Mary II’
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Hattie Spires was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Revisiting ‘Rhapsodies in Black’: British Art and the Harlem Renaissance, 1919–1939 Róisín Tapponi was awarded £1,500 towards research costs for the project Erasing the First Intifada: Black Panther Party Graffiti in the Archives of Franki Raffles’ Lot’s Wife (1992–4) Nina Vollenbroker was awarded £1,500 towards research costs for the project Deafening Space – Norms, Bodies and Architecture in Britain, 1850–1950 Event Support Grants Touchstones Rochdale was awarded £2,000 to support A Tall Order!, a public talks programme focused on Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s The UK Antarctic Heritage Trust (UKAHT) was awarded £1,500 to support a lecture on Architecture on Ice: The Hidden Story of Post-War Buildings in Antarctica
Wolverhampton School of Art, University of Wolverhampton was awarded £2,000 to support Form, Function, Future, a conference focused on the fortieth anniversary of the First Black Art Convention
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Spring 2023
Mid-Career Fellowships
Postdoctoral Fellowships
At the March 2023 meeting of the Advisory Council, the following grants and fellowships were awarded:
Adeyemi Akande (University of Lagos) was awarded £18,000 for the project Sketching Realities: Merits and Veracity of The Illustrated London News’ images on West Africa, 1842–1900
Katherine Calvin was awarded £15,000 for the project Antiquarian Speculations: Art, Credit, and Collecting between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1660–1830
New Narratives Grants MA/MPhil Studentship Skye Weston was awarded £32,000 to undertake an MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art with a research focus on DisCrit as a means of understanding post-war British art and its contribution to a ‘British’ collective memory Doctoral Scholarship Zoe Bromberg McCarthy was awarded £96,000 to undertake a Doctoral project at the Courtauld Institute of Art titled Reconceiving Blackness within British Art History Early Career Fellowship Denise Kwan was awarded £70,000 for the project Water as Method: Mapping the Ecology of East and Southeast Asian Artists in the UK from the 1980s to Present Day Senior Fellowships Alex Bremner (University of Edinburgh) was awarded £60,000 for the project A New History of Victorian Architecture
Jessica Barker (Courtauld Institute of Art) was awarded £18,000 for the project The Rule: Forming Lives, Medieval and Modern Ben Cranfield (Royal College of Art) was awarded £18,000 for the project With Time: Curating the Contemporary in Post-War Britain Madhuri Desai (Pennsylvania State University) was awarded £18,000 for the project Shared Antiquarianisms: Maratha Temple Architecture and the East India Company Sonja Drimmer (University of Massachusetts Amherst) was awarded £18,000 for the project Impressive Politics: Reproduction, Representation, and the Wars of the Roses Luke Gartlan (University of St Andrews) was awarded £18,000 for the project St Andrews and the Global Networks of Early Victorian Photography Helen Hughes (Monash University) was awarded £18,000 for the project Art and Convict Transportation from Britain and Ireland to Australia, 1787–1868
Nora Epstein was awarded £15,000 for the project Visual Commonplacing: The Transmission and Reception of Printed Devotional Images in Reformed England Sushma Griffin was awarded £15,000 for the project Resistant Mediations: The Colonial Camera and the Art of Indian Pilgrimage Rosalind Hayes was awarded £15,000 for the project ‘Look to Your Eating’: Animals, Meat, and Visual Culture in Britain, 1880–1910 Avigail Moss was awarded £15,000 for the project Peculiar Risks: Art and Insurance, 1780–1925 Naomi Vogt was awarded £15,000 for the project Invented Rituals Junior Fellowships Altair Brandon-Salmon (Stanford University) was awarded £8,000 for the project Strange Worlds: London, 1940–1994 Sarah Hutcheson (Harvard University) was awarded £8,000 for the project Spatializing the Restoration: The Building Projects of Charles II
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Grants and Fellowships
Ariel Kline (Princeton University) was awarded £8,000 for the project Mapping Fairyland: The Imperial Space of Mid-Victorian Fairy Paintings
Sarah Carter was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Empire follows Art: Trafficking Culture in Imperial Britain 1780–1830
Gian Marco Russo (Sapienza Università di Roma) was awarded £8,000 for the project Antonio Zucchi (1726–1795): An Eighteenth-Century Painter between Italy and England
Jean Marie Christensen was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Bodies of the Crown: Kinship, Health, and the Construction of the Royal Body in Early Modern English Portraiture
Archives & Library Fellowship No grants made in Spring 2023 Rome Fellowship Emma Merkling was awarded £18,446 (£7,000 to individual, £11,446 to British School in Rome) to spend time at the British School at Rome to research their project Finding Annie Swynnerton: British-Italian Symbolist Networks in Rome, 1880–1920 Research Support Grants James Bell was awarded £1,000 towards research costs for the project To All My Homosexual Schoolmasters: Intergenerational Learning in the Archives of AIDS Activism
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Simon Constantine was awarded £1,699 towards research costs for the project Aberdeen Harbour from Above and Below, 1853–1908 Hannah Darvin was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Sentimentalizing Medicine: Luke Fildes’s The Doctor (1891) and the Idealized Image of the Physician-Patient Relationship Sarah Gould was awarded £1,250 towards research costs for the project Millais, un peintre hors du temps Catlin Langford was awarded £1,980 towards research costs for the ‘Shot her way to success’: The Life and Work of Eva Barrett Réjean Legault was awarded £1,840 towards research costs for the project Brutalism and the Materiality of Post-war Architecture in Britain
Susannah Lyon-Whalley was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project ‘little & pretty like Hamersmith as her majesty says’: Catherine of Braganza’s Lost Dowager House and Garden Michael Andrew Michael was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project From Westminster to Rome Heather Mullender-Ross was awarded £1,193 towards research costs for the project Putting Us in the Picture: The Origins and Development of Stefan Themerson’s ‘Kurt Schwitters on a Time-Chart’. Massimiliano Papini was awarded £1,024 towards research costs for the project Late Victorian and Edwardian Japonisme in Peripheral Britain: Transmediality and Transculturality in John George Sowerby’s Art Practices across Painting, Ceramic Design, and Children’s Illustrated Books, 1880–1914 Ben Pollitt was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Visualising the Elements in the Art of British Maritime Exploration (1766–1814) in Australian Collections
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Kelly Rappleye was awarded £1,010 towards research costs for the project Moving (With) Images: Building Curatorial Knowledges of Glasgow’s Urban Landscape Damiët Schneeweisz was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Traveling Pictures: Tracing Portrait Miniatures in the British West Indies Tor Scott was awarded £1,000 towards research costs for the project Edith Rimmington & British Surrealism Christine Slobogin was awarded £2,000 towards research costs for the project Plastics on Paper: Dickie Orpen and the Visual Culture of Second World War Plastic Surgery in Britain Eleanor Stephenson was awarded £500 towards research costs for the project The Robertson-Aikman Collection and Archive in Scotland Event Support Grants
Dartington Trust was awarded £2,000 to support the Creative Sanctuary: Dartington in the 1930s and Beyond symposium eikones, Universität Basel was awarded £1,000 to support the Materializing Transparency workshop London Linnean Society was awarded £1,400 to support the Extinct: Empire, Art, Natural Histories in a Vanishing Planet conference MK Gallery, Milton Keynes was awarded £1,500 to support the Entangled Histories: South Asian Miniatures and Britain conference Murray Edwards College, Cambridge was awarded £2,000 to support The Women's Art Collection: Artworks and Artists in Context conference Westminster Abbey was awarded £1,500 to support the Westminster Abbey Sixteenth-Century Terracotta workshop
British Academy/University of Manchester were awarded £1,500 to support the Histories, Art Histories and Heritage Narratives in Eastern Africa virtual conference
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Running Head
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Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Learning Programme
In February 2023, Rachel Prosser was appointed Learning Programme Manager, and Esme Boggis assumed the role of Learning Programme Coordinator in September 2022. With Sria Chatterjee, the Head of Research and Learning, the team have been reviewing the Centre’s existing Learning programmes to ensure they meet the needs and learning styles of their target audiences. Yale in London hosted one Spring semester and two Summer sessions. The visiting Yale faculty members were: lecturer and writer Adam Reid Sexton, Associate Professor of History Rohit De, essayist and writer Anne Fadiman and the Renu and Anand Dhwan Professor of History Sunil Amrith. Highlights included reading Virginia Woolf’s work aloud at her Sussex home, Monk’s House, and listening to oral histories at the Black Cultural Archives. The 2022 Graduate Summer School was led by Richard Birkett and Sria Chatterjee. Twenty artists and art historians studying MFAs and PhDs across the UK and at Yale University investigated the theme of art and labour. The participants formed collaborative research cohorts as they learnt with visiting artist Onyeka Igwe and the groups Laboria Cuboniks and Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). In Autumn 2022, Martin Postle convened the Public Lecture Course ‘Georgian Provocations II’, investigating the contexts and impact of incendiary artworks from the Georgian period. In Summer 2023, Christina Faraday convened ‘Tudors Now!’, which experimented with a new format involving off-site events including gallery tours and a printing workshop, and as such was renamed the Public Event Series. Plan, Prepare, Provide continued to deliver continuing professional development sessions and a residential programme at the University of Leeds for secondary school art teachers. This year’s programme explored how teachers could embed their artistic practice in the classroom and encourage collaboration between the subjects of geography and art. The Write on Art Prize attracted much interest, with impressively written and researched responses to a range of artworks. This year the prize was judged by Sarah Munro (Director of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art) and the art historian, author and critic Ruth Millington. Yale in London Summer 2023 Session 2, students on a street art tour of London. Photo: Dani Tagen
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Learning Programme July 2022 – June 2023 Yale in London
Public Lecture Course/Public Event Series
Summer 2022, Session Two 4 July–12 August 2022
Autumn 2022
Summer 2023
Series: Georgian Provocations II
Series: Tudors Now!
Convenor: Martin Postle (PMC)
Convenor: Christina Faraday (University of Cambridge) Dates: 11 May – 5 July 2023
Number of students: 6 Courses: — BRST 214 Writing about Music in the UK, taught by Adam Reid Sexton (Yale) — BRST 158 The British Country House: Collecting and Display, taught by Martin Postle (PMC) Spring 2023 16 January–28 April 2023 Number of students: 6 Courses: — BRST 317 British Raj, Indian Nation, taught by Rohit De (Yale) — BRST 325 Murder, Mystery and British Legal History, taught by Rohit De (Yale) — BRST 161 Joseph Wright of Derby: Artist in the Age of Enlightenment, taught by Martin Postle (PMC) — BRST 154 Modern British Theatre, taught by Mark Wheatley (UK) Summer 2023, Session 1 5 June–14 July 2023 Number of students: 15 Courses: — BRST 216 Writing about London, taught by Anne Fadiman (Yale) — BRST 163 British Colonial Collecting and Display, taught by Ali Bennett (UK)
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27 October Paris Spies-Gans, ‘Establishing a Female Lineage at the Royal Academy’s Show: Eliza Trotter, Angelica Kauffman and the Intrigues of Lady Caroline Lamb’
11 May Helen Hackett, Tara Hamling and Eleri Lynn, Roundtable at the PMC: ‘Making the Tudors’
3 November Martin Myrone, ‘The Haunted Eighteenth Century: Fuseli’s “The Nightmare”’
18 May Nick Humphrey, Tours at the V&A: ‘Displaying the Tudors’
10 November Esther Chadwick, ‘A Black King in Georgian London: British Art and Postrevolutionary Haiti’
1 June Mick Clayton, Francesca Hughes and Steve Linehan, Workshops at the St Bride Foundation: ‘Historical Printing’
17 November Nick Robbins, ‘George Romney in the Prison-World of Europe’ 24 November Nika Elder, ‘John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark” and the Taste for Flesh' 1 December Martin Postle, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby: Self-Portrait as an Experimental Artist’ 8 December Panel Discussion – Chaired by Mark Hallett and featuring Martin Myrone, Paris Spies-Gans, Esther Chadwick, Nick Robbins, Nika Elder and Martin Postle
8 June Jerry Brotton, Matthew Dimmock and Lauren Working, Roundtable at the PMC: ‘Globalising the Tudors’ 22 June Peter Brathwaite, Mat Collishaw and Emily Hannam, Roundtable at the PMC: ‘ Re-Making the Tudors’ 5 July Charlotte Bolland, Karen Hearn and Robert Tittler, Tour and Roundtable at the NPG: ‘Painting the Tudors’
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Graduate Summer School
Write on Art
18–29 July 2022
The prize, now in its sixth year, is a collaboration with the digital platform Art UK. It encourages students aged 15 to 18 to develop crucial visual literacy and writing skills.
Number of participants: 20 Theme: Art and Labour
Judges: Sarah Munro (Director of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art) and Ruth Millington (Art Historian, Critic and Author) The winners of the 2022–23 cycle were: Years 10 and 11
Years 12 and 13
First place: Lulu Frisson on Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando by Edgar Degas
First place: Tony Choy on Circe by John William Waterhouse
Second place: Matilda Jones on The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche
Second place: Nilla Feron Clark on Terpsichore by Maud Sulter
Third place: Katie Joslin-Allen on The Pomps of the Subsoil by Leonora Carrington
Third place: Ophelia Lanfranchi on Gluck by Gluck
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Running Head
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Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Plan, Prepare, Provide The Plan, Prepare, Provide (PPP) programme was developed by the University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, in partnership with the Association for Art History. It has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre since 2021. It offers unique subject-specific opportunities and a network of support to secondary school art teachers and their schools. This offer includes a residential programme, CPD sessions and a targeted Postgraduate Certificate in ‘Developing Teachers’ Research and Practice’. This year the programme included two online CPD workshops: ‘The Earth without art is just “eh”’ and ‘A Tonic for the Troops’; and a two-and-a-half-day in-person teachers residential programme at the University of Leeds.
Total instances of engagement in PPP 2022–23
61
Number of teachers who participated in PPP 2022–23
53
Number of teachers who attended ‘The Earth without art is just “eh”’
20
Number of teachers who attended ‘A Tonic for the Troops’
13
Number of teachers who attended the Teachers’ Residential Programme
28
Combined average weekly student reach of teachers who participated in PPP 2022–23
The Plan Prepare Provide teachers’ residential programme. Photo: Andy Lord
6,795
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Archives and Library
Work in the Archives & Library (A&L) this year has focused on audiences. A series of projects were undertaken with the aim of developing a better understanding of existing users; exploring new means of promoting access; and widening and removing barriers to engagement. There have been many strands to this work including, but not limited to, carrying out a detailed statistical analysis of existing audiences; taking part in externally organised audience surveys; investigating new and innovative means of providing access across the sector; reviewing Collection Development policies to ensure they adequately address developments in the field going forward, and liaising with donors accordingly. All of this work has resulted in changes to A&L practices. The Centre made two joint acquisitions during the year, the first of which demonstrates audience development work. Deanna Petherbridge donated her archive and library to the Centre in November 2022. Born in 1939, her multi-faceted career – as artist and freelance curator, writer and teacher – demonstrates new routes into the art-historical profession. As a woman who worked – particularly at the beginning of her career – to promote British drawing outside the UK, her papers also contain voices previously underrepresented among the Centre’s holdings. Petherbridge’s archive includes material spanning the whole of her career, from the 1960s to present. Alongside correspondence with scholars and colleagues, the highlight of the collection is a series of ‘annual files’, which meticulously document her varied activities and engagements, including visits outside the UK, for example to India and Iran. The library contains fifty volumes of Petherbridge’s writings, catalogues of exhibitions she curated and of her own work. The acquisition of Michael Kerney’s library and archive, donated in March 2023, continues to develop the Centre’s collecting of decorative arts. Michael Kerney, who died in October 2022, devoted over thirty years to the detailed study of Victorian (and later) architecture and decorative arts. He was an acknowledged authority on the history of English stained glass during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Along with scarce twentiethcentury publications, his library is full of rare nineteenth-century books 36
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
and trade catalogues on British stained glass and church design in general. As well as correspondence with scholars in the field, his archive includes a series of notebooks recording visits to see stained glass across the country. A&L staff continue to host a wide range of group visits, including students, societies and professionals working in the field. Similarly, they took part in other initiatives aimed at promoting access such as seminars, conferences, filming and social media. Research Collections Fellowships The 2020–21 and 2021–22 A&L Fellowship holders, Joshua Mardell and Hans Hönes, both completed their research, giving papers at various events and each curating one of the Centre’s Drawing Room Displays (for details, see the Networks section of this Report). Chloe Julius was awarded the 2022–23 Fellowship. Her research is focused on the subject of Brian Sewell and British art history in the 1990s. In relation to this, she delivered a paper at the British Records Association’s Creative Encounters: Art in the Archive conference in September 2022. She also organised, in conjunction with the Warburg Institute, a workshop at the Centre titled ‘The Intellectual Histories of Art and the Archive’. Archives & Library Student Placements The A&L hosted a two-week postgraduate student placement in May 2023. Rosalind Henderson, studying on the UCL Archives and Records Management MA course, worked with staff to catalogue the Nigel Surry Archive. Staff Lucy Kelsall, the Assistant Librarian, left the Centre to retrain in September 2022. Lucy started at the Centre in July 2019 as cataloguer of the Oppé Library, and was appointed to the post of Assistant Librarian in March 2021. 37
Archives and L ibrar y
Her post was filled in December 2022 by Gaetano Ardito, who joined the Centre from the British Museum. Pawel Jaskulski took up an eighteen-month post as Digital Preservation & Records Manager in September 2022. This role was created to help the Centre begin to address concerns about the long-term accessibility of digital records. Pawel has significant experience in the field, having worked in similar roles at London Metropolitan University, Heatherwick Studio and the National Theatre. Hannah Jones, the Centre’s first A&L Assistant (Graduate Trainee) was recruited in June 2022. This one-year post was established to fill a growing need at the Centre and to provide the postholder with essential training in the key skills required to embark on a career as an archivist, librarian or other information professional. The post has been designed with a structured programme throughout the year involving internal and external training and visits to similar institutions. Hannah has made a great success of the role and has secured a place on the UCL Archives and Records Management MA. A new postholder, Nida Shah, has been recruited for 2023–24. Library A total of 781 new books and exhibition catalogues were acquired and accessioned during the year. As well as newly published materials acquired by purchase and gift throughout the year, the library received two larger donated collections. In August 2022, Andrew Moore donated eighty books relating to art and photography in Norfolk, including exhibition catalogues from Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. This was in addition to a previous donation of fifty items in September 2021. Geoff Brandwood bequeathed to the Centre runs of two architectural journals; in September 2022, the library received a nearly complete run of the nineteenth-century title The Ecclesiologist and most of the issues of Academy Architecture and Architectural Review. The Librarian catalogued the Andrew Moore donation as well as some previously acquired donations including the Giles Waterfield library. 38
A group of students from London Metropolitan University visiting the Archives & Library in October 2022
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
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Archives and L ibrar y
The Assistant Librarian concentrated on cataloguing the backlog of purchased materials acquired over the past five years, cataloguing over more than 800 titles in the first six months in post. He also created skeleton records for all the books from the Michael Kerney donation. All the library’s catalogue records are exported to Library Hub Discover. Library staff undertook a much-needed reorganisation of the library stores, rearranging the journals’ sequences and ensuring that the library’s growing Special Collections are safely and securely housed. Archive Fifteen archive collections were offered to the Centre from private donors during the year. Following careful assessment against the Centre’s published Archive Collection Statement policy and, in some cases, an on-site appraisal, nine were declined and three remain under consideration. Three archive collections were acquired. Alongside the Petherbridge and Kerney Archives, the Lucy Wertheim Archive was kindly donated to the Centre in July 2021 by Philippe and Lucilla Garner. Wertheim (1883–1971) was a patron, gallerist and collector who founded the Twenties Group of British artists in their twenties. She had no formal art training and faced significant challenges forging a career in the male-dominated 1930s art scene. Wertheim’s archive includes material relating to exhibitions held at her gallery, but also extensive correspondence with the artists whose work she was buying and exhibiting. It contains a particularly rich group of letters between the artist Christopher Wood and Wertheim, who was his main patron before his suicide in 1930. The acquisition of this collection supports the A&L’s audience work and desire to better reflect under-represented voices. The Centre also acquired two further deposits of material relating to the Benedict Nicolson Archive. In August 2022, Nicolson’s daughter, Vanessa, kindly donated some additional personal material: schools reports, photographs and Nicolson’s letters to his close family. A second deposit 40
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
– comprising letters exchanged between Nicolson and his wife Luisa Vertova – was made in January 2023. All of this material will enhance existing holdings and is in the process of being catalogued. Institutional Archive The Archivist & Records & Data Protection Manager (ARDPM) completed the National Archives’ Digital Peer Mentoring scheme and recruited a Digital Preservation & Records Manager. Liaising with the Centre’s Operations staff and external IT support, the focus of work throughout the year was on the migration of records from the shared drive (on-premises server) to SharePoint. This was successfully achieved in June 2023. The next stage of the project will focus on the migration of records from other spaces (Google Drive and hard drives). General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) The ARDPM continued to work with staff to ensure that both new Centre initiatives and existing everyday working practices were compliant with GDPR. GDPR training was also given to all new starters. Work concerning the Centre’s audiences was again the focus of the year: the ARDPM was responsible for co-ordinating a project working with external partners (The Audience Agency) to identify, export and analyse audience data from across all Centre activities. The resulting statistical report has given the Centre an improved understanding of its existing audiences. It will also be used to inform equality, diversity and inclusion work going forward.
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Networks
The Centre’s networks connect and sustain researchers and professionals engaging with British art across an array of contexts, including museums, galleries, heritage, art spaces and live and online programmes as well as academic studies. Reflecting our commitment to champion new ways of understanding British art history and culture, our networks are designed to foster knowledge sharing; create spaces for people to experiment, inquire and grow professionally; and help develop an expanded sense of community in the sector. The Centre supports three ongoing networks: the Doctoral Researchers Network (DRN), the Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN) and the British Art Network (BAN), which focuses on curatorial practice and theory. The Networks team also organises two programmes aimed at developing relevant skills and knowledge: ‘British Art in Motion’, which provides training and mentoring for a selected group of undergraduate students leading to the production of short films on British art, as well as the ‘Art Trade Forum’, which brings together emerging researchers and professionals for a series of behind-the-scenes tours and talks during London Art Week. The team is additionally responsible for delivering the programme of Drawing Room Displays at the Centre, with three new displays in 2022–23 exploring themes reflected in the Archives & Library collections and the history of the Centre and its home at no. 16 Bedford Square. The strategic development and programming of the individual networks are led by Convenors. In 2022–23, the DRN was led by Co-Convenors Claudio di Tosta (University of Warwick) and Lauren Houlton (University of Westminster), and the ECRN by Co-Convenors Nick Mols (Cardiff University) and Alex Gushurst-Moore (University of Cambridge). Along with individual programmes of events exploring research skills, funding and professional development questions, both groups organised exhibition visits and worked together on the joint symposium ‘Expanding the Field: Rethinking Methodologies in British Art Research’. Featuring presentations from doctoral and emerging researchers in British art, the symposium was notable for exposing the intersections between practice-based and more established forms of 42
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
research, as well as the growing role of new media, participatory research models and curatorial engagement in British art studies. The BAN, supported by the Centre alongside Tate, with additional public funding provided by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, marked its ten-year anniversary in 2022. During 2022–23, Martin Myrone continued as Convenor of the British Art Network, having taken up the role of Head of Grants, Fellowships & Networks at the Centre in July 2022. The BAN team, based at the Centre and at Tate, has overseen the continuing growth of the network, supporting thirteen Research Groups focused on different aspects of curatorial practice and theory; fifteen separate Seminars providing spaces for more experimental or incubatory thinking; and the Emerging Curators Group, which brings together fifteen individuals to share their experiences and develop their thinking about curatorial practice over a tenmonth programme. To mark the anniversary of the network, BAN organised an extended annual conference in November 2022, featuring a series of reflections on the recent past and possible futures for British art curating, and the premiere of a newly commissioned documentary film, Unravelled, by Niyaz Saghari, which is freely available online. In partnership with the Yale Center for British Art, BAN organised its first Curatorial Forum in October 2022. This residential programme brought together a group of British art curators from the UK, Australia and the US for an intense programme of gallery and museum visits in New Haven, Boston, Providence and New York. Having started in 2012 with just over 300 members, BAN’s membership numbers have continued to rise steeply, from 1,350 in June 2022 to more than 1,800 in June 2023. As the growth of BAN’s membership numbers reflects, the Centre’s networks play an increasingly important role in connecting and supporting researchers, curators, artists and educators, and expanding the field of British art studies to encompass creative, curatorial and more experimental perspectives alongside traditional forms of research and publication.
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Networks July 2022–June 2023 Where venues are not specified, events were held online
British Art Network (BAN)
2023
Research Groups
2 March British Landscapes: ‘Close Look, Distant View’, symposium at Suffolk Archives, Ipswich
During 2022–23, BAN supported thirteen Research Groups focusing on specific areas of British art. Their programmes of activities, including workshops, seminars and networking sessions, are developed and led by network members. Selected events organised by Research Groups included: 2022 18 July British Landscapes: Peter Harrap, ‘Constable vs Grigorescu: A Walk Off’, talk at Romanian Cultural Institute London 25 July Working Class British Art: ‘VOICE: The Working Class Voice in Contemporary Culture’, event at the National Poetry Library, London 6 September Art and the Women’s Movement in the UK, 1970–1988: ‘Mary Kelly’s Multi-Story House’, drop-in discussion, The Whitworth, Manchester 26 October Disability in British Art: ‘What Does Disability Bring to British Art?’, Nottingham Contemporary and online 5 November The Art of Captioning: ‘Temporalities of Access’, online event 30 November Black British Art: ‘BBA x Venice’, online panel discussion 5 December Black British Art: ‘BBA x Venice’, online workshop
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28 March Art and the Women’s Movement in the UK, 1970–1988: ‘Mapping the Context: In Conversation with Griselda Pollock and Sutapa Biswas’, online event Emerging Curators Group The Emerging Curators Group (ECG) is a supportive forum for the next generation of curators in the UK, enabling peers to come together and share experiences and thinking around curating British art. 2022 28 July Research Knowledge and Working Collaboratively, online workshop 29 September Applying for Funding, online workshop 11 October Final ECG workshop, online 22 November ECG networking event, Turner Prize, Liverpool 2023 27 February Introductory session, online 25 April ECG In-person one-day workshop, Leeds Art Gallery
British Art Network Conference 2022 15–24 November: 2012/2022 A Decade of British Art Curating To help mark its ten-year anniversary, BAN’s annual conference programme for 2022 explored a decade of British art curating, offering multiple perspectives on curatorial practices and knowledge production; reflecting on the material and social forces at work since 2012; and exploring the innovations and missed opportunities we have seen over these years. 15 November ‘Beyond Othering: Curatorial Practice and the Neurodiversity Paradigm’, online event, convened by Sonia Boué, with Ashokkumar Mistry, Kate Adams, Miranda Millward and an artistic programme featuring Lucy Baker, Lindsay Seers, Sam Metz, Sharif Persaud, Anna Farley and Project artworks 17 November ‘Curating in the Contemporary: The Art School, Museum, and the Academy’, convened by Victoria Walsh, with Kirsty Ogg, David Dibosa, Ben Cranfield, Andrea Phillips, Gavin Wade and Lucy Rose Solitt 22 November ‘Perspectives on a Decentred Decade: Local and Global Perspectives’, convened by Bryan Biggs, with Matthew Cornford, Mohini Chandra, Derek Horton, Alice Correia, Ella S. Mills, Anjalie Dalal-Clayton and Skinder Hundal
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
24 November ‘Reflections on a Decade in British Art Curating’, chaired by Martin Myrone, roundtable with Mark Sealy (Autograph ABP), Helen Legg (Tate Liverpool), Alex Farquharson (Tate Britain), Sophia Hao (University of Dundee) and Mark Hallett (former Director, PMC) Additional Programme: 24 November Gallery tour and discussion of British paintings at the V&A, London, led by Jenny Gaschke Tour of Hackney Windrush sculpture commissions with Create London, led by Marie Bak Mortenson ‘Vlad Basalici’s Last Archive: “every work I make will be dated 2012”’, convened by Roxanne Gibescu, at the Paul Mellon Centre
BAN Seminars In 2022, BAN provided support for fifteen individual seminars or workshops taking an experimental approach to themes in British art curating. 2022 9 September ‘Enlightened Women: British Women Artists in the 18th Century’, curatorial workshop at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, organised by Lara Nicholls 9 September ‘The Artist Interview in Britain’, workshop at the Paul Mellon Centre led by Lucia Farinati and Jennifer Thatcher 14 September ‘Art, Memory and Place’, seminar at Turner Contemporary, Margate organised by Art360 Foundation 23 September ‘People, Collections, and Colonial Histories: A Workshop on Research and Engagement in 18th and 19th-century British Art’, seminar at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 3 October ‘Curating Roman Catholic Material Culture, 1536–1829’, workshop at the British Museum, London, organised by Rachel King, Amina Wright and Tessa Murdoch 10 October ‘“The Work Before the Work”: Redrafting Institutional Writing Practices’, online workshop organised by Maria Fusco, University of Dundee and Adam Benmakhlouf 17 October ‘Inter Scape: South Asian British Women Artists’, online event chaired by Jasmir Creed with Kristen Kreider
19 October ‘The Politics and Ethics of Interview Transcription’, workshop at the Paul Mellon Centre led by Lucia Farinati and Jennifer Thatcher 20 October ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, tour of Hackney Windrush sculptures and workshop at the Paul Mellon Centre, organised by Marie Bak Mortensen and Leanne Petersen (Create London) 20 October ‘Curatorial Strategies for Civil Rights Protest Aesthetics’, screening and talk at Goldsmiths, University of London, organised by Nina Wakeford and Clare Carolin 26 October ‘Radical Art in Cambridge’, roundtable at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, organised by Amy Tobin 28 October ‘Feed Forward: Heritage of Slavery’, closed curatorial workshop at the Museum of London Docklands organised by Feedforward, 29 October ‘Curating Magic’, online talks and panel discussion organised by Tor Scott, Helen Bremm and Emma Sharples 2 November ‘Social Justice Curating’, closed workshop session organised by Hannah Geddes 4 November ‘What is Next? How Do We Turn Intentions into Actions Through Social Justice’, workshop at London College of Communication organised by Hannah Geddes 2023 21 March ChART, an exhibition from Brown Leaders and Makers Exist (BL&ME) at Chelsea College of Art
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Networks
Doctoral Researchers Network
Early Career Researchers Network
DRN and ECRN Collaborative Events
2022
2022
5 December ECRN Research Talks
13 December ‘Demystifying the Monograph: How to Publish Your First Book’
2022 21 November PhD Toolkit: Research-led Filmmaking Workshop 5 December PhD Toolkit: Working with Others
2023
2023
6 February ECRN Research Roundtable: Funding
6 March Research Careers in the Cultural Sector: Working for an Independent Research Organisation
23 February Seminar: ‘SeventeenthCentury Anglo-Chinese Artistic Interchange’
20 March Research Careers in the Cultural Sector: Curators’ Roundtable
17 April ECRN Research Talks
20 April Curator’s introduction and selfled tour of Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning, Turner Contemporary, Margate 26 May Roundtable: Queer Voices in the British Creative and Cultural Sector 13 June An Introduction to Public Speaking and Networking
19 May ECRN Cambridge Away Day: ‘Creative and Digital Art Histories’
2023 23 June: Symposium: Expanding the Field: Rethinking Methodologies in British Art Research (PMC and online) Session 1: ‘Transnational Identities’, chaired by Lauren Houlton, with papers by Rahila Haque, Helena Cuss, Jessica Johnson and Lucy Shaw Session 2: ‘Perception, Practice, and Participation’, chaired by Alex GushurstMoore, with papers by Layla Khoo, Antonio Capelao, Adam Benmakhlouf and Alex Culshaw Session 3: ‘Reconsidering Visual Culture’, chaired by Claudio di Tosto, with papers by Lea Stephenson, Sonal Singh, Tania Cleaves and Nora Epstein Session 4: ‘Creation: Media, Technology, and Representation’, chaired by Nick Mols with papers by Excellent Hansda, Dawn Kanter, Clare Chun-yu Liu and Richard Müller
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Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Art Trade Seminar
British Art in Motion
Drawing Room Displays
The Art Trade Seminar offers emerging curators, arts professionals and researchers the chance to see the London trade at work and explore practices and processes of acquiring art for public collections.
British Art in Motion is a film competition for undergraduate students designed to generate creative and thought-provoking short films about works of British art or architecture, from all periods.
The displays programme at no. 16 Bedford Square showcases materials from the Archives & Library collections, and focuses on themes in British art history and the history of the Paul Mellon Centre. Three displays were held during 2022–23:
4–6 July 2022 at the Paul Mellon Centre and around London, including a field trip to Strawberry Hill, Twickenham Session 1: Collections and Acquisition Development Session 2: Art Dealers Session 3: PMC Workshop Session 4: Auction Houses Session 5: The Museum Session 6: Round-up and Reflections
14 October 2022 Film festival and prizegiving: the winner for 2022 was Edward Dowding (University of Edinburgh) for Edinburgh Southern Motor’s Garage 26–20 June 2023
19 September 2022–6 January 2023 Fleeting Encounters: British Art and the Connoisseurial Gaze, curated by Hans C. Hönes
Copyright and Creative Reuse of Archive Materials in Filmmaking workshop, with Bartolomeo Meletti (Learning on Screen)
16 January–5 May 2023 An Activist Scholar: The Gavin Stamp Archive, curated by Joshua Mardell
Essential Video Production Skills workshop, with Frazer Ash (Learning on Screen)
30 May–15 September 2023 A Harpy and His Brothers: The Wildmans in Bedford Square & Newstead Abbey, curated by Martin Myrone
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Special Projects
London, Asia The London, Asia research project is co-led by the Paul Mellon Centre’s Director, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Hammad Nasar, Senior Research Fellow. By convening workshops, talks and conferences along three research strands – exhibitions, institutions and art schools – the London, Asia research project is working towards a more expanded and diverse narrative of British art. The project has built a large, dynamic and international community of researchers, artists, curators and educators who regularly interact through events and meetings. The project was established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, in 2016, and after the successful completion of phase one in June 2019, the project was awarded a further two years of funding by the Board of Governors to support a second phase of activity until June 2021. A third and final phase is focused on the delivery of the exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends, to be held at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, from November 2023 to February 2024. This is a research-led project that focuses on the artist Li Yuan-chia’s LYC Museum & Art Gallery in the village of Banks, in the northwest of England, between 1972 and 1983. The exhibition will be curated by Hammad Nasar, Sarah Victoria Turner and Amy Tobin (Curator of Exhibitions, Events and Research at Kettle’s Yard and Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge). The exhibition brings together works by Li and the artists who were part of the artistic programme at the LYC (including Winifred Nicholson, David Nash, Lygia Clark, Takis and Liliane Lijn), alongside contemporary artists whose work resonates with the spirit of Li and the LYC. It will be accompanied by a catalogue and a programme of public events and performances, including a satellite exhibition at the West Court Gallery at Jesus College, Cambridge, focusing on Li’s ink paintings. The project has also funded the digitisation of the collection of LYC Museum exhibition catalogues held at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester; and hosted an artist residency for Charwei Tsai at Wysing Arts Centre in rural Cambridgeshire.
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Li Yuan-chia, Untitled, 1970, paint on fabric wall hanging (detail). Image courtesy of the Li Yuan-chia Foundation. Photo: Matthew Hollow
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
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Spe cial Proje c ts
During 2022–23, the primary focus of the London, Asia project has been a series of workshops and research visits, including to David Nash and Claire Langdown’s studio in Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, and to the Richard Demarco Archive in Edinburgh. These will inform the exhibition, programme and research-rich publication for Making New Worlds, through the accounts of those with lived experience of the LYC Museum and a new generation of artists and researchers who have discovered Li and the LYC through the archive. In the 232-page publication, the curators establish Li’s work at the LYC as a form of worldmaking, connecting his cosmic conceptual art practice to his interest in participation and friendship, as well as his engagement with nature and the landscape. Their account is accompanied by nine shorter texts – by Elizabeth Fisher, Ysanne Holt, Annie Jael Kwan, Lesley Ma, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Luke Roberts, Nick Sawyer and Harriet Aspin, Nicola Simpson, and Diana Yeh – that trace the diverse threads and ramifications of Li’s practice. Richly illustrated, with reproductions of rarely seen archival material, Making New Worlds will offer a fresh account of Li’s practice and his contribution to twentieth-century British art. Climate & Colonialism This year saw the launch of the Climate & Colonialism project led by Sria Chatterjee, the Centre’s Head of Research & Learning. The project works towards new and interdisciplinary understandings of visual and material culture produced around and in response to the interrelated and enduring histories of colonialism, capitalism and climate change. Bringing together a range of media – including painting, sculpture, video, performance, architecture and photography – and time periods, this project takes an intersectional approach in which overlapping systems of oppression are considered in dialogue with the past, present and future. A primary aim of this multi-year project is to provide a testing ground for transhistorical conversations and collaborations between art historians, artists and other scholarly and community groups thinking critically about colonialism and climate change. 50
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
In January 2023, the project hosted its first event, a symposium titled ‘Synthetic Histories: Plastics, Climate and Colonialism’. Held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in Dundee, it brought together thinking from the project and V&A Dundee’s exhibition, Plastic: Remaking our World (closed February 2023). The symposium explored plastics, climate and colonialism as sets of interconnected and contingent elemental, material and socially extractive relations. The Climate & Colonialism Reading Group was launched in February 2023, and meets twice per term. Readings foreground ecofeminist, Black, Brown and Indigenous scholarship that focuses on the intersections between the environment, extraction and colonial systems. In February 2023, Climate & Colonialism welcomed its first Visiting Fellow, Astrida Neimanis (Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan, Canada). Her research focuses on bodies, water and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Astrida also joined the Climate & Colonialism working group, a core set of collaborators who will support and contribute to developing different interdisciplinary strands of the research project over the next three years. Current working group members include: Debjani Bhattacharyya (Chair for the History of the Anthropocene, University of Zürich), Rachael Z. DeLue (Professor of Art History and American Studies, Princeton University), and Mark Sealy and Bindi Vora (Executive Director and Curator, Autograph).
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Staff Research Activities
Sarah Victoria Turner Acting Director Sarah’s research activities this year have been dominated by preparations for a major new exhibition and publication, Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends. The exhibition, co-curated with Hammad Nasar (Senior Research Fellow, PMC) and Amy Tobin, will open at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in November 2023. The exhibition and book are two outcomes of the London, Asia research project, which has received special project funding approved by the Centre’s Board of Governors. London, Asia is reported on in more detail in the Special Projects section of this report. Sarah also contributed the essay ‘Frederick Cayley Robinson: Mystical Modern’ to the catalogue accompanying the Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries: British Art, 1880–1930 exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum. She was invited to give a keynote lecture at the conference in September 2022, exploring the work of the artists featured in the exhibition. Beyond the Centre, Sarah continued to serve on the advisory boards of the Warburg Institute and Tate Etc., providing her expertise in arts management, research development and publishing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
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Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
Sria Chatterjee Head of Research & Learning This year saw Sria laying the intellectual groundwork and ideas for the research project, Climate & Colonialism, launched at the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023. Her continuing research on the relationship between the arts, histories of colonialism, capitalism and environmental justice will feed into and be enriched by the project’s many collaborations and planned outcomes, both for scholarly and wider communities. For the Museums Journal’s special issue on climate justice, Sria contributed the essay ‘Climate and Colonialism’, which opened up a conversation about the interconnected nature of colonial expansion and the longer history of natural and human exploitation, and the need to acknowledge the many ways in which it lives on in our institutions and lives today. For a special issue on viral theory brought out by e-flux Journal in 2022 she contributed an essay ‘Contingent Contagion’, which argued that the way we look at images and visualise pandemics today is contingent on longer histories of seeing, of colonialism and racial capitalism. Her essay ‘Political Plants: Art, Design, and Plant Sentience’ was published in Cultural Politic in a special issue on multispecies justice in 2023. Sria gave lectures and talks in Zurich, Sydney (which she did online) and across the UK. Highlights included talks entitled ‘Soil, Air & Ecological Stewardship’ at Goldsmiths, University of London, and ‘The Origins of Vital Soil: Nationalism and Art in Early Twentieth-Century India’ at the Imagining Lost Origins conference at King’s College London. At the Centre, Chatterjee gave a short talk at a workshop on Hew Locke’s The Procession, which is currently being adapted for a film project initiated by Mark Hallett and Hew Locke. She was invited to serve on the panel of judges for the PEN HessellTiltman Prize awarded by English PEN for a non-fiction book of specifically historical content, and continued to serve as Editorial Advisor for the journal British Art Studies and on the Steering Group of the British Art Network.
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Staff Research Ac tivities
Martin Myrone Head of Grants, Fellowships & Networks Martin’s major research output during this period has been A Biographical Dictionary of Royal Academy Students, 1769–1830, volume 84 of the Walpole Society. Reflecting more than two decades of research on the Royal Academy and its early students, including archival work undertaken as a PMC Mid-Career Fellow in 2014–15, this new reference work includes biographies of the 1,800 students who attended the Academy Schools during their first sixty years. Covering a seminal period in the development of the British art world and a transformative moment in artists’ identities and aspirations, this publication shares the original biographical data which underpinned Martin’s earlier book, Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain (PMC, 2020). Martin remains active as a scholar of British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He contributed the chapter ‘Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist’ to The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts (2022) and curated A Harpy and his Brothers: The Wildmans in Bedford Square & Newstead Abbey, a Drawing Room Display held at the Centre from May to September 2023. Focusing on the lawyer Thomas Wildman, one of the earliest inhabitants of no. 16 Bedford Square – the Centre’s home since 1996 – the display and the accompanying booklet explored the connections between the Wildmans and William Beckford, and the sources of their wealth in Jamaican slave plantations and the slave trade, as well as the links with Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Martin continues to research the history of Bedford Square, and the social and aesthetic lives and afterlives of Georgian terraces. Martin remained a Trustee of Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, through to its successful re-opening in November 2022 after a major redevelopment and extension, and became a member of the Executive Committee of the Walpole Society in November 2022.
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Thomas Rowlandson and Auguste Charles Pugin, Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy, Somerset House (detail), 1808, etching and aquatint, 271 x 340 mm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Repor t 2022–2023
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Staff Research Ac tivities
Martin Postle Senior Research Fellow Martin continued in his four-year full-time post as Senior Research Fellow, focusing his research on a projected catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby, to be published by the Paul Mellon Centre. He also continued to teach, offering two courses on the Yale in London Programme: ‘Art and the Country House’ in the second summer session of 2022, and ‘Joseph Wright of Derby: Artist in the Age of Enlightenment’ in spring 2023. At the PMC, he convened the inaugural Art Trade Seminar in July 2022, and also convened the Autumn Public Lecture Course, ‘Georgian Provocations II’, in which he gave a lecture on the self-portraits of Joseph Wright. Martin also served on the following committees and boards: International Advisory Board, British Art Journal; the Council of the Attingham Trust; Trustee of the Catalogue Raisonné of Works by Philip de László; Trustee of Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham; and executive committee member of the Walpole Society. He also continued to serve on the Acceptance in Lieu Panel, administered by Arts Council England, and to provide expert advice to the UK Government’s Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest.
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Board of Governors
Advisory council
Governors
Members
Susan Gibbons Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communication and Chief of Staff to the President, Yale University, and ex-officio Chief Executive of the Paul Mellon Centre
Timothy Barringer Paul Mellon Professor History of Art, Yale University
Stephen C. Murphy Vice President for Finance & Chief Financial Officer, Yale University Peter Salovey President and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology, Yale University Scott Strobel University Provost and Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, Yale University
Edward S. Cooke, Jr Charles F Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Director of the Center of Study in American Decorative Arts and Material Culture; Professor of American Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies for History of Art, Yale University Pericles Lewis Dean of Yale College and Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University Courtney J. Martin Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art Jules D. Prown Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus Director of History of Art, Yale University Keith Wrightson Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University
Jo Applin Courtauld Institute of Art Rachel Chatalbash Yale Center for British Art Tarnya Cooper National Trust Viccy Coltman University of Edinburgh Elena Crippa Tate Britain Caroline Dakers Central Saint Martins David Dibosa Chelsea College of Arts John Goodall Country Life Julian Luxford University of St Andrews Dorothy Price Courtauld Institute of Art Christine Riding National Gallery Mark Sealy Autograph ABP Nicholas Tromans Independent Art Historian