This was Tomorrow: Reframing Pop

2026 marks the seventieth anniversary of This is Tomorrow, the seminal exhibition held at the Whitechapel Gallery in August 1956, and widely cited by scholarship as a definitive moment in the development of Pop Art.

The ‘Pop’ on show in This is Tomorrow shared little in common with the later strategies of Warhol, Lichtenstein et al., instead being marked by what Lawrence Alloway described as the ‘ethnographic’ approach of the Independent Group. This localised fracturing and difference is matched by the painterly, abstract, or Kitchen Sink inflected approaches of other British ‘Pop’ artists. These anomalies mirror the heterogeneities of global responses to mass media in the post-war era, as well as the radically different subjectivities displayed in the art of women ‘Pop’ artists such as Evelyn Axell and Rosalyn Drexler. In short, for all Pop’s importance to our understanding of contemporary art, there is precious little agreement on precisely what the term delimits.

We thereby invite papers that subject both the specific histories of This is Tomorrow and the wider history of Pop Art to critical examination. Does ‘Pop’ remain a useful analytical framework and term for art historians? How is its efficacy determined by local and global contexts? What new narratives can we create when we challenge its familiar tropes and strictures?

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Ed Kettleborough, University of Bristol, e.kettleborough@bristol.ac.uk