Academic Activities

The Centre’s Academic Activities encompass a broad programme of events, including international conferences, research seminars, workshops, lectures and talks. This year we held over sixty-five events, which featured no less than 350 speakers. Furthermore, we have aimed to engage a much wider and more diverse audience with the work of the Centre.

In the first week of July 2017, we partnered with other cultural and educational institutions in our historic square, including Yale University Press and the Architectural Association, in organising the first Bedford Square Festival. As part of the Festival, we arranged walking tours, talks and film screenings highlighting the new research on British art that the Centre funds and promotes. The Bedford Square Festival has now become a popular and much-anticipated annual event. The second festival took place in July 2018 and planning for the 2019 iteration is already underway.

A highlight of this year was our collaboration with the contemporary artist Jeremy Deller. Typically, there has been a space in our events calendar in January in the years when we are not organising the biennial Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery. The gap in 2018 was filled with a series of talks called The Look of Music, which opened with a lecture at the Barbican by Deller himself. He introduced the series by reflecting on some of his own projects, such as “Last Night a Brass Band Saved My Life”, in the context of British cultural and political life. This was followed by three more talks, all orchestrated by Deller to connect with the theme of the series. In the atmospheric surroundings of the Life Room at the Royal Academy of Arts, the distinguished cultural historian Jon Savage discussed the image of the male pop star and boy band. The world-renowned stage designer Es Devlin discussed the imagery of her work for theatre, opera and musical performers, including Beyoncé and Adele, in which she draws on the history of art, and especially the visual rhetoric of portraiture. The series was rounded off with a conversation between the designers Scott King and Mark Farrow and the singer and one-half of the Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant. The popularity of these events has encouraged us to start a biennial collaboration with a contemporary artist every other January, thus connecting the worlds of historic and contemporary art and expanding our reach to new audiences.

William Fairey Band at Manchester Airport, 1997, image courtesy of Jeremy Deller and used in Jeremy Deller’s talk “Last Night a Brass Band Saved my Life” on 10 January 2018 at Barbican Centre