ART HISTORY FESTIVAL 2023 – Yorkshire

Dr Adrienne L. Childs and Dr Nicola Jennings discuss The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture which they recently guest curated at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds with the Institute’s Head, Laurence Sillars.

Showing images from the exhibition, they review the challenges of presenting to a contemporary audience a selection19th century sculptures and paintings which responded to and reinforced problematic conceptions of the female body, race and sexuality. They also consider the positive response to the exhibition by the general public and local and national press, and how the experience demonstrates that a diverse range of visitors are interested and receptive to pre-modern artworks if they are interpreted in relevant ways.

Dr Childs is Adjunct Curator at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. and independent scholar.

Dr Jennings is Director, Athena Art Foundation and Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Laurence Sillars is Head of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

A guided tour of the De Morgan Museum at Cannon Hall’s stunning collection, on the theme of Colour; Inspiration, Insight & Imagination in the multimedia artworks of the De Morgans.

An informal and relaxed lunchtime talk by the gallery’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nigel Walsh.

It will explore how the discovery of a painting by Vorticist Helen Saunders under the surface of Wyndham Lewis’s portrait Praxitella (1921), might unravel new meanings of both artworks.

Does the reconstruction through science of the ‘whited out’ lost colour world of Saunders’s ‘Atlantic City’ (c.1915), disrupt understanding of Lewis’s portrait in which he struggled to establish a new language for Western avant-garde art in the post-war world?

Join James Knox from the Fleming Collection for an illustrated online talk on the four artists known as the Scottish Colourists – Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, John Duncan Fergusson, George Leslie Hunter and Samuel John Peploe.

Discover how artists have experimented with colour, form and line – you’ll take a closer look at a selection of 20th and 21st century works that can all be loosely defined as abstract, by artists such as Avinash Chandra, Joan Miró, John Hoyland and Bridget Riley.

Join us to experiment in this free, hands-on activity and add some colour to our collaborative canvas.