Special Projects

London, Asia

The London, Asia research project is co-led by the Paul Mellon Centre’s Deputy Director for Research, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Hammad Nasar, Senior Research Fellow. Phase one of the project came to completion in June 2019 and the project has been awarded a further two years of funding by the Board of Governors to support a second phase of activity. Through its 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. It posits London as a key, yet under-explored, site in the construction of art-historical narratives in Asia, and reflects on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with and challenges existing histories of British art. It was established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong).

The London, Asia project has organised a number of workshops, talks and conferences that have offered opportunities to share new research and to network, including an international conference at Manchester Art Gallery entitled ‘The LYC Museum & Art Gallery and the Museum as Practice’, which focused on the artist Li Yuan-chia and the networks he created through his museum project. In 2018, the first London, Asia Research Award holder, Dr Sarena Abdullah, senior lecturer at the School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), completed and presented her research at the PMC. Titled ‘The Commonwealth Institute: Contexts, Collaborations, Contestations’, Dr Abdullah’s project explores the artistic relationship between Malaysia and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and will be published in a forthcoming issue of British Art Studies. A second Research Award holder was also appointed in 2018: Ming Tiampo, a full professor in art history, co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and director of the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. Professor Tiampo is conducting research on how the Slade School of Fine Art, which welcomed students from all over the world from its inception in 1871, functioned as a crucible of encounter and a site for articulating ‘Global Asias’.

Art and the Country House

The Paul Mellon Centre research project, Art and the Country House, led by Dr Martin Postle, continues to focus on the collection and display of works of art in the country house in Britain from the sixteenth century to the present day. The eight houses selected as case studies are: Castle Howard, Yorkshire; Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire; Mells Manor, Somerset; Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute; Petworth House, West Sussex; Raynham Hall, Norfolk; Trewithen, Cornwall; and West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.

Over the past year, research has continued on the various case studies, and new pieces have been commissioned on the collections and displays at Raynham Hall, Mells Manor and Petworth House. In July 2018 Dr Postle visited the Earl of Oxford and Asquith at Mells Manor, followed by a group visit by the research team to inspect works of art and materials in the archive. Further visits were also made to Petworth House, Castle Howard and Mount Stuart. A workshop, where ongoing strands of work were presented, was held at the Paul Mellon Centre in November 2018.

In May 2019, Dr Postle and Dr Emily Burns delivered papers based on project research at the 17th Annual Historic Country Houses Conference, ‘Country House Collections: Their Past, Present, and Future’, held at Maynooth University and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. In June 2019 Dr Postle offered a summer undergraduate course on ‘The British Country House: Collecting and Display’ for Yale in London, which included visits to Petworth House and Castle Howard, and incorporated research conducted during the project, and talks by various project contributors. The final results of the research project are to be published online by the Paul Mellon Centre by the end of 2020.

George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field

October 2018 saw the opening of a major new exhibition on the contemporary artist George Shaw at the Yale Center for British Art. Entitled George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field, this was a joint venture between the Yale and London Centres. It was curated by the PMC’s Mark Hallett, working in collaboration with Matthew Hargraves of the YCBA. The display offered a survey of Shaw’s career thus far, featuring more than seventy of his works, ranging from No. 57 (1996), produced while he was a graduate student at the Royal College of Art, to Mum’s (2018), painted for the exhibition in New Haven, and subsequently purchased by the Yale Center.

The exhibition, after its three-month run at the YCBA, travelled in revised form to the Holburne Museum in Bath, where it opened in February 2019 for a period of three months. It was extremely well received in both venues, enjoying a very favourable review in the Wall Street Journal, and a five-star review from the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones.

The exhibition, its catalogue and a special set of four films commissioned to accompany the display by Jon Law, Lily Ford and Jared Schiller, all represented highly collaborative endeavours. Hallett and Hargraves worked extremely closely with the artist himself in preparing and then hanging the show. Hallett, as well as writing the bulk of the exhibition catalogue, also edited the work of a stellar collection of contributors, who included the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, and the art historians Tom Crow, Catherine Lampert, David Mellor and Eugenie Shinkle.

George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field also generated a series of scholarly events in New Haven, London and Bath, including conversations with the artist and film screenings that featured talks by the artist as well as by Law, Ford and Schiller.

George

Photographic Archive

Between 1964 and 1969, the Paul Mellon Foundation began to collate an internationally important collection of reference photographs of paintings, sculpture, architecture and the decorative arts, as well as images of sketchbooks and exhibitions. This practice was continued when the Foundation was re-established as the Paul Mellon Centre in 1970, and maintained until 2013. Over the years, the Photographic Archive has provided scholars with a broad and much-consulted source of information about works of British art and architecture.

An ambitious project to reconsider modes of access for the Photographic Archive collection began in earnest in spring 2018, with the collection being removed to an off-site location for digitisation. Picturae was appointed to make digital copies of the back and front of every object in the collection. Digitisation was undertaken at Picturae’s facility in New Jersey, USA, and completed in January 2019. The collection was then returned to the UK for permanent off-site storage.

The Centre hosted a workshop in November 2018 in order to inform the development of the digital Photographic Archive platform. Forty participants who responded to a public call were invited to explore the possibilities and challenges of using digitised photo archive materials. A series of presentations, tasks and discussions designed to interrogate the project helped to create a clear list of recommendations.

In consultation with the PHAROS consortium of fourteen international research institutes that hold similar photo archives, the Centre also undertook research into best practice in the field in order to determine how to publish its collection online. The infrastructure required to deliver a project of this nature was identified and procured: Gallery Systems was contracted to produce a Collections Informational Management System, Digital Asset Management System, Application Programming Interface, and public catalogue. Development of these systems continued throughout the 2018–2019, and continues into 2019–2020, as does the creation of metadata to allow discovery of the resources. Online publication of the collection is planned for 2020.

British Art Network

The British Art Network (BAN) is one of a series of Subject Specialist Networks inaugurated in 2012 by Arts Council England. The aim of the British Art Network is to facilitate the sharing of expertise, research and ideas across museums, galleries and academic institutions in the UK. In early 2019, the PMC committed financial support and resources to a relaunched British Art Network, in partnership with its two other funders, Tate and Arts Council England, and an initial steering committee for the BAN was held at Tate Britain on 27 March 2019.

The BAN was formally relaunched on the evening of 28 May 2019 at Tate Britain, a new, and more ambitious phase in the network’s development being made possible largely due to a significant financial contribution of £75,000 from the PMC, authorised by its governors at Yale in December 2018, and covering the period until July 2020. This was supplemented by in-kind managerial support from the PMC, including the appointment of Martin Postle as the BAN’s interim convenor. Tate also agreed to fund a full-time coordinator for the BAN, and appointed Jessica Juckes to the post.

At the relaunch, the BAN agreed to support the following strands of activity in the period to June 2020: the creation of a dedicated group of early career curators, designed to create a supportive forum for the next generation of curators in the UK to share experiences and thinking around British art the creation of British Art Network sub-groups that explore specific areas of British art, led by regional network members across the UK the inauguration of three seminar series (each comprising four events) organised by regional network members across the UK the organisation of three BAN workshops, the first of which was hosted by Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums on 28 June 2019, on the subject of curatorial eco-systems the organisation of two major conferences, to be hosted in March 2020 by National Museum Wales, Cardiff, and in June 2020, co-hosted by Tate Britain and the National Gallery, London.