Academic Activities

The Centre’s academic activities programme continues to expand and diversify. Over the year we have welcomed researchers, curators, art professionals, students and members of the general public from across the UK and internationally to our events, both physically into the Centre and virtually via our website. We are always thinking about new ways to communicate the importance of British art, culture and heritage to wider audiences and to foster new collaborations. The Bedford Square Festival is indicative of this. In July 2018, we co-organised its second iteration in partnership with our neighbouring cultural organisations in the historic square in which the Centre is based. The programme included lectures, workshops, walking tours and ‘open house’ events, with an ethos of opening up what we do to new audiences. There is already evidence that members of the public who have encountered the Centre for the first time through the Festival have come back to visit and use our resources. As the Centre approaches its fiftieth anniversary, we are also creating an audience development plan and have held two internal workshops to support this work. Our ambition is to create new and more diverse audiences to ensure that our work remains relevant and vibrant as we enter the next fifty years of the Centre’s history.

The list of events included in this report gives a sense of the richness of the research culture in the field of British art. We always encourage researchers at different stages of their careers to interact with us. Our research lunches often showcase unpublished work by PhD students and provide a supportive environment in which to receive critical feedback. The Centre’s Wednesday evening research seminars have similarly offered more established scholars the opportunity to present soon-to-be or recently published work. The year 2019 also included the very popular Mellon Lectures given by Professor Tim Barringer (Yale University), titled ‘Global Landscape in the Age of Empire’, held at the National Gallery in London, and supported by a programme of workshops at the PMC. In financially difficult times for the museum and gallery sector, the PMC’s support often enables collaborative events, especially large-scale conferences, to take place alongside an exhibition. We are delighted to have co-organised such conferences and workshops with a number of museum partners this year, including the Garden Museum, Manchester Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery.