SESSION: Local Studies (FULL-DAY PART 2)
In recent decades, scholars have increasingly challenged the dominance of canonical centres in art historical narratives. Yet the frameworks of centre and periphery continue to shape how local art histories are researched, written and valued. Too often, studies of regional or site-specific practices must justify themselves by claiming international significance or by aligning with dominant paradigms and places. What becomes visible when we take locality seriously—not as a stepping stone to global relevance, but as a meaningful endpoint in itself? How might alternative methods of engaging with the regional, including community collaboration, archival re-readings and situated critique, help construct new art historical narratives?
In focusing on the local, this session aims to expand the possibilities of art history—not only upward or outward, but laterally and intimately. We explore the richness of local art histories without recourse to external validation, and resist and subvert that impulse.
This session reflects on the ecological, economic and ethical dimensions of working locally. In an era of climate crisis, rising costs and increasing awareness of extractive research practices, locally-grounded studies may offer more sustainable models for scholarship—less dependent on long-haul travel, global art fairs and elite networks, and more embedded in relationships of care, accountability and reciprocity.
Session Convenors:
Fiona Anderson, Newcastle University
James Boaden, University of York
RJ Wade, University of Leeds
Part 2 Session Speakers:
Gavin Butt, Northumbria University
Learning from Bradford: Albert Hunt’s complementary studies experiment
Albert Hunt, a working-class Oxford graduate, was employed by the Regional College of Art, Bradford, in 1965 to teach complementary studies to advanced-level art and design students. The college was aiming to offer a new degree-level qualification, the DipAD, but was refused the necessary national accreditation to do so. Hunt was therefore left to teach complementary studies to students on lower-level and vocational courses in textiles, graphic design and painting. And yet despite this seemingly inauspicious start, Hunt and his students went on to develop a form of “cheerful and militant learning” at Bradford. They performed as the Bradford Art College Theatre Group, making irreverent, political performances and experimenting with playful forms of deliberative assembly and happenings to facilitate “free” thinking and action inside the education institution. During the 1960s and 1970s, Hunt was internationally recognised as a pedagogue, theatre-maker and author of Hopes for Great Happenings, but his work has generally fallen into obscurity since then.
How does this episode from the history of regional English art education expose and challenge elitist assumptions about advanced study and artistic provincialism? How might we think again about the value of work or study in a place without national or international status? And what are the challenges and possibilities of carrying out experimental projects with vocational students generally hailing from lower-class regional backgrounds? Based on original archival and oral history research, the paper’s reflections will resonate for art educators in the contemporary neoliberal university and will be contextualised with reference to recent scholarship on provincialism and regionalism.
Ella Nixon, University of Cambridge
Peripheral Vision: The Feminist Potential of Non-National Institutions
The term “Great Woman Artist” has emerged in academic, curatorial, and public discussions to draw attention to gendered patterns of invisibility within the Western art history canon. This paper proposes a localised framework to challenge the reliance on globalised tropes when discussing and curating women artists, in order to resist stereotypical representations.
Through a comparison of two contrasting case studies, I argue that peripheral centres offer opportunities for the collection, display, and integration of women’s art. First, I explore why regional galleries typically contain a higher proportion of work by women artists than national institutions. The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne constitutes the first case study, through which I illustrate historical and contemporary patterns of acquiring work by “local” women artists. I demonstrate how regional collecting patterns differ from those of national centres, which market themselves globally to an international audience. Then, I focus on The Women’s Art Collection (WAC) as an example of a specialised peripheral institution whose collection is inextricably linked to its unique identity as part of an all-women’s college at the University of Cambridge.
Finally, I examine the feminist implications of community collaboration as a response to the museological shift from collection- to audience-based practice. The term “relevance” is often used as a marketing tactic to attract large—but not necessarily diverse—audiences to blockbuster exhibitions. In contrast, I discuss intra-regional collaboration at both the Laing and The WAC with nearby galleries, universities, and community groups as a method that resonates with the audience-focused emphasis on “relevance,” ultimately subverting traditional art-historical narratives.
Julia Carabatsos, Columbia University
Banana Leaf Printing: Local Plants and the Tropical Sun in Alice Dixon Le Plongeon’s Photographs of Yucatán
In the 1870s, Alice Dixon Le Plongeon vacated her residences in London and New York to set sail for Yucatán, where she collaborated with her husband Augustus on archaeological projects that included extensive photographic documentation of Maya art and architecture. Though period and subsequent exhibitions and publications have attributed the photographs to solely Augustus Le Plongeon, this paper uses archival research and visual analysis to reveal Alice Dixon Le Plongeon’s key role in preparing and printing from the couples’ negatives on site in Yucatán, and in particular in developing an alternative photographic process that grappled with the challenges of producing images from finicky chemicals in a tropical climate by deploying local flora such as banana leaves to control sun exposure across her compositions. Photographs printed via Dixon Le Plongeon’s techniques not only depicted scenes of Yucatán, this paper argues, but also embodied its climate and depended on its local plants. Dixon Le Plongeon’s situation forced her to test accepted knowledge and reform photographic techniques when supposedly universal methods and imported materials failed in her circumstances. The question of the local was particularly heightened in 1870s Yucatán, when Indigenous Maya forces rebelled against the Mexican government and reclaimed a portion of the peninsula. Dixon Le Plongeon’s images demonstrate how photographs can encode specificities of place through means beyond their subject matter—including distortions of light and shadow created by her shading photographic paper from the sun using banana leaves—and prompt further consideration of these less conspicuous traces of the local.
Millie Riddell, Courtauld Institute of Art
As Good a Land? Reorienting the local in Aotearoa land art
British-New Zealand artist Kimberley Gray’s As Good a Land… (1974) consisted of thirteen scarecrows, constructed with the help of local schoolchildren and placed at remote sites down the length of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, along the shortest longitudinal distance between Auckland and Wellington. Gray’s documentation of the work – photographs taken from the ground during construction, then from a low-flying aircraft, and finally from the perspective of the scarecrows themselves – render visible places frequently traversed by air but inaccessible from the road and thus rarely visited. As Good a Land…’s engagement with these sites and their visibility is fleeting and disorienting, calling into question the knowability of place, perception and distance.
This paper argues that the work orients “the local” as a place of active negotiation and disruption, resisting easy categorisation within global land art discourse and New Zealand landscape traditions alike. I contend that As Good a Land… is simultaneously embedded in specific geographies and communities while also occupied with orientation, perception and visibility at a planetary scale. Stepping outside centre/periphery models that have long attended discussions of New Zealand art, I explore what these scalar tensions in Gray’s practice reveal about the intersections of land art and settler colonial history, particularly the legacies of colonial cartographic processes and infrastructures as they relate to local realities of the people who live on the work’s whenua (land).