2024 Annual Conference Keynote Speakers
We are thrilled to announce our 2024 keynotes:
- Paul Goodwin, University of the Arts, London
- Ben Highmore, University of Sussex
- Our current and former chairs, Christopher Breward, Director of National Museums Scotland, Christine Riding, The National Gallery, London, Evelyn Welch, University of Bristol and Nigel Llewellyn, Independent, join AAH CEO Gregory Perry for a panel discussion on 50 years of the AAH: Art History and the Association.
Paul Goodwin
Paul Goodwin is a curator, researcher and educator based in London. Goodwin’s research and curatorial interests span the fields of transnational art, urbanism and curatorial practice with a focus on African diaspora art and visual cultures. He is Co-Lead Investigator for Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation an international research project funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social and Human Sciences (T-AP).. Goodwin’s recent curatorial projects include: W.E.B. DuBois: Charting Black Lives (House of Illustration, London, UK, Nov. 2019), We Will Walk: Art and Resistance from the American South (Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, Feb. 2020) and Untitled: Art on the Conditions of Our Time, Chapter 2 (Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, May 2020). Goodwin is Professor and Chair of Contemporary Art & Urbanism and Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity & Nation (TrAIN) at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
Paul will present on: Re-thinking Black Art: curatorial models
Black art and questions around ‘Black aesthetics’ have emerged in recent years as a resurgent force in art on both sides of the Atlantic. Following the racist murder of George Floyd and the global movements around Black Lives Matter and decolonization, the question of Black art – its form, function, and future – has moved into central view with a huge number of exhibitions, publications, research projects and Black artists gaining prominence in globally.
This talk will offer some critical reflections on the nature of contemporary Black art practices and their positioning in relation to the museum and exhibitionary complex in a transnational perspective. The talk will foreground some curatorial models from my practice in the last few years that seek to explore what can be termed the ‘edges’ or fringes of Black art. Many of these dissident and little-known practices – from the back yards of the American South to neo-conceptual artworks in white cube galleries – point to an alternative genealogy of Black art practice, and indeed art practice in general, that engage questions of refusal, fugitivity and abstraction rather than representation and a focus on the black body.
The talk speculates that these fugitive practices and their modes of encounter may pose some important questions about the disciplinary and institutional norms deployed to sustain and promote the discursive space of ‘Black art’. Consequently, traditional models of art history and curating based on static notions of black representation and bodily integrity may need to be rethought.
Ben Highmore
Ben Highmore is a writer, researcher and teacher with expertise in many areas of 20th- and 21st-century culture. As a cultural historian he has published books on post-war taste and everyday life studies, including ‘Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late Twentieth Century Britain’, ‘The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain’, ‘The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House’ ‘Everyday Life and Cultural Theory’, ‘Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture’, ‘Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday’ and ‘Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation, and Cultural Politics’. He has recently finished a book on the cultural history of playgrounds, which will be published as ‘Playgrounds, the Experimental Years’ by Reaktion Books in September 2024. Currently he is working on two books. One is a study of the innovative abstract painter Sir Frank Bowling to be published by Manchester University Press as ‘Frank Bowling and the Promise of the New World’. The other is a book on experimental humanities research and writing called ‘Vehement Experiments: Imagining the Humanities in an Age of Competing Emergencies’ with Duke University Press. He regularly works as a consultant for cultural institutions such as the Barbican and the V&A and has appeared on BBC TV and radio, and Channel 5. Between 1993 and 2006 he taught in Bristol at the University of the West of England and in 2007 he joined the University of Sussex. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2021.
Ben will present on: History Through Art: The Challenges and Opportunities of an Unreliable Witness
Instead of writing the social history of art, Craig Clunas invites us to write and research social history through art. The change in preposition has profound implications. It asks us to reflect on our commitments, our values, and our operating procedures. If the past is our goal, then why have we chosen to go there via vehicles that are often wilfully obscure and mute in their testimony? Or worse, vehicles that misdirect and mislead? What can a painting, a sculpture, or an installation offer us that parliamentary debates and parish records can’t? In this talk I want to champion an art history attuned to feelings, moods and atmospheres, an art history that wants to make such ambiences part of the historic record. In the background lies the ghost of the cultural materialist Raymond Williams and his evocative phrase ‘structures of feeling’. What can we still learn from this overused and under-explained phrase?
The AAH at 50: Art History and the Association a panel discussion
Current Chair of the AAH, Christopher Breward, joins former Chairs Christine Riding, Evelyn Welch and Nigel Llewellyn for an ‘in conversation’ hosted by our CEO Gregory Perry, reflecting on the recent history of the discipline and of the Association as well as the present and future of art history in academia, in the museum sector and beyond. How does a subject association best support a discipline, particularly in this era of threat to arts and humanities subjects in the HE sector? What role do we all play in helping our subject to thrive?
Christopher Breward is Director of National Museums Scotland. Trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum he has published and curated widely on the histories of fashion, style, masculinities, and city life. Chris’s professional career has included roles across the art school, university and museum and galleries sector. He has worked at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Royal College of Art, London College of Fashion and Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh and before joining National Museums Scotland was Head of Research at the Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington and Director of Collection and Research at National Galleries Scotland. Chris has served on a number of Boards and Advisory Committees, including the Pasold Foundation, Fruitmarket Gallery, the Edinburgh Art Festival, Glasgow School of Art Collections, Hospitalfield Arts and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Christine Riding was appointed Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery in February 2023, having been the Jacob Rothschild Head of the Curatorial Department and Curator of British Paintings for four years. Before joining the National Gallery, Christine held curatorial positions, first at the Museum of London and the Palace of Westminster and then, from 1999 to 2011, at the Tate, where she co-curated numerous exhibitions including ‘Hogarth’ (2007) at Tate Britain and ‘Gauguin: Maker of Myth’ (2010) at Tate Modern. From 2011-18 she was Head of Arts and Curator of the Queen’s House at the Royal Museums Greenwich. She was the curatorial lead on the major refurbishment of the Queen’s House, Greenwich, which included commissioning the installation in the Great Hall by Turner prize winning artist Richard Wright. From 2007‐12, Christine was Deputy Editor of ‘Art History’ and from 2014–2019, she was Chair of The Association for Art History.
Evelyn Welch is Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Bristol. Evelyn graduated from Harvard University, receiving her PhD from the Warburg Institute. She was previously Senior Vice-President for Service, People & Planning at King’s College London, and had been Vice-President (Arts and Sciences) and Provost (Arts and Sciences). She has also held senior leadership roles at University of Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London. As Professor of Renaissance Studies, she has led major research programmes including ‘The Material Renaissance,’ and ‘Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images’. She recently completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for a project on ‘Renaissance Skin’ and has authored numerous books, including Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800 (OUP 2017), and Shopping in the Renaissance (Yale 2005), winning the Wolfson Prize for History.
Nigel Llewellyn trained as an art historian at UEA in the early 1970s. One of his tutors there was John Onians, who later became the Founder Editor of the AAH’s journal, Art History. His post-graduate teachers at the Warburg Institute included Michael Baxandall and EH Gombrich. His initial specialism in the Renaissance was regarded by the University of Sussex as the perfect qualification to teach the Enlightenment and the C18th. This he did from 1978 till 2006 when he moved to Tate to establish and run their first Research Department having spent several years seconded to the AHRC as Director of their Research Centres scheme. His first AAH memory was attending an early annual conference at Cardiff and he then joined the Executive Committee and served as Chair from 1992-95. He stayed closely involved with the Association in the run up to the CIHA 2000 conference in London which he directed.