2020 Art History Insights

Each month we publish ART HISTORY INSIGHTS, which is a free e-newsletter that brings together selected articles of interest and opinions from the world of art history and visual culture. Each issue usually focuses insights around a specific theme or topic. Our newsletters are free and available to all. If you want to sign-up to receive them please click here.

Here is the full run of 2020 ART HISTORY INSIGHTS for you to read and enjoy.

JANUARY
To mark the celebration of Chinese New Year, our January issue focused on Chinese art and art history. Including Art historian, Wu Hung, on how Enlightenment ideas underpin, and complicate, the long history of Chinese art, and what lavish paintings, robes and objets d’art can tell us about China’s last Empresses. See more.

FEBRUARY
February is Black History Month, or African-American History Month in the US, so this issue focused on north American black art and black art histories, including ‘what if our text books were black’ and Kerry James Marshall on ‘When you put black people in the picture, what should they be doing?’ See more.

MARCH
March celebrates International Women’s Day and Women’s History month, so this issue focused on women artists in art history, including Griselda Pollock on ‘Mary Cassatt’s overlooked radicalism’ and the Getty Research Institutes ‘Radical Women’ audio archive project that includes interviews with Eva Hesse, Yoko Ono, Lee Krasner, Alice Neel, Helen Frankenthaler and Betye Saar. See more.

APRIL
April 2020 would have hosted the Association for Art History’s 46th Annual Conference in Newcastle. This issue of Insights brought together articles and recordings related to the 2020 Annual Conference that never was, including articles and talks by would have been keynote speakers, Lynda Nead, Courtney J Martin, and Geoffrey Batchen. See more.

MAY
Most of us were experiencing global lockdown in May 2020. In this issue of Insights we reflect on the impact of lockdown, and what a post-pandemic future holds for arts, culture and education. Including an honest and insightful article on the future of museums by Dan Hicks, who participated in our ‘Future of the Museum Blockbuster’ discussion later in the year. See more.

JUNE
June is Pride month. This issue celebrated queer art and art history, particularly through the lens of black artists and intersectional art history. It linked with a Twitter campaign by our Doctoral and Early Career (DECR) Committee, and was co-edited by Daniel Fountain, a member of our DECR committee. See more.

JULY
This issue focused on the history of botanical art. Including articles on botanical illustrations by women artists in the National Museum Wales collection and the story of 52 year old Maria Sibylla Merian who, in the summer of 1699, took a cargo ship to South America, accompanied only by her 22 year old daughter. See more.

AUGUST
This issue looked at monuments and statues. It was guest edited by DECR committee member Clare Fisher at the University of St Andrews, and Rebecca Senior, Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Nottingham. Including an article by artist and art historian Eddie Chambers’s as he draws parallels across the Atlantic, highlighting the international resonance of recent protests and the centrality of monuments to them. See more.

SEPTEMBER
September is ‘back to school’ month and a time to learn new things. This issue invites readers to re-think, or think differently about aspects of art and art history. Including ‘what is fallism?’ and how power and leadership have been depicted from ancient Greek and Roman statues, coins, murals, to Kehinde Wiley’s more recent Obama portrait. See more.

OCTOBER
This issue focused on Art, Craft and Industry, which linked with the theme of our Global New Voices virtual postgraduate research conference that took place in November. Including articles on the Gee’s Bend Quilters and ‘needlepainter’ Mary Linwood. See more.

NOVEMBER
Our November issue focused on art in relation to war and conflict, which was the theme of this year’s online Ways of Seeing Week for A level students and teachers. Including articles on women war artists and propaganda posters. See more.

DECEMBER
This final issue of the year brings together some of the best articles from 2020. See more.