Curating as Pedagogy (FuLL-DAY PART 1)
Papers are invited to explore curating as a symbiotic coproduction of research and discursive convenings with knowledge sharing outputs that include exhibitions, Researcher and Artist Residencies, Public Events, and Academic Partnerships, Affiliated Teaching posts, and more, with a focus on Henry Moore and the curatorial and research strategies of the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens.
Since its founding by Moore in 1977, the Henry Moore Foundation has placed research at the heart of its curatorial practice and exhibitions programme with the largest Archival holdings on Moore being open to all. The panel highlights the research-led exhibitions of HMF to disseminate new knowledge on Moore; and the new HMS&G Post Doctoral Researcher becoming an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
We aim to critically reflect on the theoretical and methodological frameworks through which research, expanded learning, and the display and exhibitions on Moore’s work are conceived and received. This is to challenge centre-periphery models in Art History and exhibition histories and share scholarship and new frameworks to understand Moore’s work and its dissemination in a transhistorical and transnational context. Curating as Pedagogy in relation to Moore may serve as a place to rethink the geography of British art and the global dialogues that Moore’s work exists in.
Papers examine specific exhibitions or positions on research methodologies related to Moore, and how curatorial practice itself can function as a form of research and pedagogy.
Session Convenors:
Laura Barlow, Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, Henry Moore Foundation
Laura Bruni, Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, Henry Moore Foundation
Alexander Marr, Department of Art History, University of Cambridge
Speakers:
Megan Kincaid, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Henry Moore’s Transnational Network: Exhibitions, Magazines, Virtual Communities
This paper examines the pivotal role that exhibitions and magazines played in structuring Henry Moore’s transnational artistic presence between the 1930s and 1950s. In particular, it brings into critical focus how networks of communication contributed to Moore’s outsize – yet still underexamined – role in the development of biomorphic abstraction in Europe and the Americas. Taking the archive as a point of departure, the paper will enliven how the exhibition emerged as a space of dialogue and debate in which dispersed artists tested new visual languages, confirmed and broke with group ideologies, and issued proposals for art’s
social responsibility. This paper will chart Moore’s correspondences with artists in London, Paris, and Mexico City—examining exhibitions, periodicals, newspaper clippings found across various archives, particularly the Henry Moore Archives, to reconstruct Moore’s interactions with artists of the Surrealist diaspora and biomorphic abstraction.
This social history pays particular attention to how Moore’s significant presence and influence outside Britain was mediated by virtual channels, like artist-run magazines and group shows, that produced dynamic transnational circuits during otherwise dislocating episodes of war and exile. Underlying this narrative is a potential reappraisal of mid-century abstraction: evidencing the formation and dissemination of a radical vision of abstraction that emerged during the period, both between and outside of the so-called “centers” of artistic production. At stake in these exchanges was an ideological conception of art’s transformative potential and an aesthetic that accordingly expressed generative and communal relations between body, land, and culture.
Lisa Newby, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norfolk Museums Service & University of East Anglia
Experiencing Aspects of Henry Moore at the ICA, c.1950
Creating an open, collaborative and forward-looking environment for artists and the public to interact was integral to the founding vision of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Building on this aspiration, Henry Moore’s contribution to ‘1950 Aspects of British Art’, the group exhibition that officially launched the ICA’s first permanent premises, provides important insights into an evolving relationship between Moore’s studio practice and his public identity.
This paper will reflect on the different agendas shaping experiences of Moore’s work in ‘1950 Aspects of British Art’, including his own. How, I will ask, can a critical perspective on these multi-layered historical interactions inform new approaches to the complicated and unstable relationship between studio practice, curation and pedagogy?
Drawing on research carried out at Henry Moore Studios and Gardens from 2023-25 I will argue that an expansive approach to Moore’s exhibition archive offers to opportunities to interrogate this.
Lucas Gómez-Doyle, Independent Researcher, Chicago, IL
Curatorial Fission, Curatorial Fusion: Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy
Located in Chicago, Henry Moore’s twelve-foot bronze sculpture, Nuclear Energy, honors the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi’s scientific achievement of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Since the monument’s commemoration in 1967, the sculpture has faced a swarm of curatorial activations that have conditioned the political geography of its past and present memory.
This proposal revisits the monument’s history attuned to contemporary curatorial projects that explicitly respond to Moore’s work, creating a landscape of material, aesthetic, and philosophical environments from which to reread the sculpture. In 2017, OPA, commissioned by UChicago Arts, produced Nuclear Thresholds, and in the same year, Cai-Guo Qiang released Colorful Mushroom Cloud. Years later, the Japanese artist Eiko Otake enacted They Did Not Hesitate, one of many works presented during Start a Reaction, organized by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Pedro Reyes. Largely unknown, however, are the numerous student-run demonstrations on the sculpture’s site, civic protests that utilized Moore’s work as a pedagogical/curatorial background. Taking place across the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, gatherings interceded on ecological, nuclear, and racial causes across transnational contexts.
I argue that the combination of two curatorial frameworks, institutional/private and grassroots/public, decades of converging unanticipated artistic and civic engagement, have enabled Moore’s work to maintain its relevance, particularly in an era when monuments have attracted unrelenting scrutiny. This proposal is the first paper to collate this rich history, sourcing unpublished material, letters by Moore, photographs of the site, and design plans to illustrate how curating for the public taught us how to rethink the life of this sculpture.