Department of History of Art, University of York

Huge congratulations to Professor Michael White who last week received a long service award for his 25 years at the University of York! 👏 Seen here at the ceremony with Michael are the Vice Chancellor, Professor Charlie Jeffery and our Head of Department, Professor Liz Prettejohn. We are very lucky to have had Michael in the Department for all of these years. Thank you for being such a wonderful colleague and for sticking around! 😊✨

Thank you for this excellent shot of Prof Michael White, Prof Jason Edwards and PhD student Gemma at tonight’s Henry Moore Institute opening! Gemma is rightfully showing off her display in the library on Westminster Abbey 😃👏✨

Well done and congratulations to alumnus Yanqi Huang who has been selected as a member of the 6th cohort of the New Architecture Writers programme based at the Architecture Foundation and co-run by the Architectural Review!

From the website: “New Architecture Writers is an experiment in radical architectural pedagogy that began in London in 2017. It has since become a platform for new writing about architecture and cities by young critics of colour. The free, 12-month programme offers emerging writers from under-represented backgrounds the opportunity to develop their critical voice, editorial connections and writing skill."

🙌✨

Bombsquad is holding another street art and graffiti show in York, opening this Saturday!

Over 4 floors in a disused office block, ‘ Rise of the Vandals’ records the history of York’s graffiti scene and work by local & internationally renowned artists, featuring film, artifacts, site specific installations & sculpture as well as works painted directly on walls & canvas.

This is the fourth project from ‘Bombsquad’ – a York based non-profit art collective and this year sales of work will support their chosen charity S.A.S.H. – a youth homeless charity in the North of England.

Address: 2, Low Ousegate, YO1 9QU

Featured Artists: KID ACNE, REMI ROUGH, JAMES JESSOP, KEITH HOPEWELL, NIKKI GOLDUP, JO PEEL, SODA, KMG, LINCOLN
LIGHTFOOT, INKIE, BOXXHEAD, REAL STATE, RIZAK, ANONYMOUSE, COLOQUIX, PREFAB 77, REPLETE, ROWDY, CHU, SOLA, DAN CIMMERMANN, 3 DOM, ACERONE, MUL,SHARON McDONAGH, STEVE BOTTRILL, MICHAEL DAWSON, JIM McELVANEY, LISTEN04

Opening Times (11am-6pm)
Weekend 1 – 22nd, 23rd June
Weekend 2 – 28th, 29th, 30th June
Weekend 3 – 5th, 6th, 7th July
Free entry, donations welcomed ✨

Dog friendly! 🐶

[Keith Hopewell]
[Remi Rough]
[Style Stars York 1988]
[KidAcne ASpeckOfDust print]

Ahead of the “Monuments in Conversation: Westminster Abbey in the 18th Century” event, the speakers had a preliminary workshop on Monday. Any guesses where?
The event takes place at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds on Wednesday 17 July. For the full programme and to register please visit https://henry-moore.org/whats-on/monuments-in-conversation-westminster-abbey-in-the-eighteenth-century/ . All welcome! 😊

York Festival of Ideas gets going this weekend, with lots of fantastic talks and exhibitions! One of the highlights is the exhibition ‘Lenses Across Time: Views of Aghanistan’, curated by our own Richard McClary, and Tamanna Faqirzada Krami, formerly of the British Council in Kabul, Afghanistan.

“There has been a long history of British engagement with Afghanistan, but for so much of the past two centuries the focus has been on warfare and control, and less on engaging with the rich cultural heritage of the country. In contrast, this expressive exhibition features striking large-format photos of people and monuments from across Afghanistan, recorded by Bruce Wannell and Robert Hillenbrand. The exhibition includes images from both before and after the long period of conflict that started with the Soviet invasion in 1979.”

The exhibition is free and open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 9am to 4pm, and Saturday, 10am to 4pm at Hungate Reading Cafe, Ground Floor, Bellerby Court, Hungate, YO1 7AF

‘Arts of the Islamic World’ is still running at the Borthwick Institute on campus too!
First image courtesy of Robert Hillenbrand. Exhibition photos courtesy of Richard McClary.

Opening tonight!!✨

It’s exciting to see features on alumna Lizzie Hippisley-Cox, and also current second year Stained Glass Conservation and Heritage MA student Gemma Lees in the latest Anna Plowden Trust annual report!

The Anna Plowden Trust was set up in memory of Anna Plowden CBE, a leading conservator of her generation, and supports education and training in heritage conservation. Read more at annaplowdentrust.org.uk/about-us

Congratulations to Theo Gordon and Flora Dunster on the publication of their book “Photography - A Q***r History”! Tonight at 6:30pm they will be in conversation with James Boaden in Derwent College room D/N/056, followed by a drinks reception in the History of Art foyer in Vanbrugh College- all welcome!

In the book Dunster and Gordon examine how photography has been used by artists to capture, create and redefine the category ‘queer’. The authors explore different concerns across ten thematic sections, featuring the work of over 140 photographers from the emergence of the medium up to the present day and argue for an expanded conception of the overlap between ‘queer’ and ‘photography’, looking not to reify a canon, but instead asking how the two have produced each other across history, at the behest of social and political conditions.

Last week students on our ‘Painting on Light’ module went on the annual trip to Scarborough! We are assured that they saw some very fine examples of stained glass (do go to St Martin-on-the-Hill if you can), and did not spend all the time having fun at the seaside, but unfortunately we do not have photographic evidence!

We are so excited for our PhD student conference tomorrow Friday, 26 April! We have an exciting range of papers being presented over the course of the day and are looking forward to our postgraduate students all coming together to support our speakers! Please drop in if you are on campus to hear about the fascinating projects of our research students.

Papers include:
Natalia Polunina: Conceptualising Russian Architecture of the 19th Century
Stephen Kerr: The Model Modernist Mass-Housing Interior
Leah C Tharpe: “Birds of a Feather”
Jun Zhang: Fake Words in an Authentic Work: A Study on Xu Bing’s “Book from the Sky”
Man Li: The RMB City Project, Popular Culture and National Identity
Parshati Dutta: Za Nur Jahan Begam ain sara abad- Viewing inscription and reading architecture in the caravanserai of a Mughal Empress
Midori Kono: An Ambitious Portrait- A Collaborative Work of James McNeill Whistler and Théodore Duret
Martin Brook: Essil Rutherston (1880-1952) Giving ‘the art collector’s wife’ her own identity and place in British 20th-century art history
Amélie Castellanet: Dada Zurich Haptic Works and Displays

Join us this Wednesday 24 April at 5pm in the Berrick Saul Tree House when we welcome Dr Leah Clark, University of Oxford for her talk “Fit for the Gods: Chinese Porcelain and Collecting Practices at the Court of Ferrara”

[image: Giovanni Bellini with Titian and Dosso Dossi, Feast of the Gods, oil on canvas, Venice/Ferrara, 1514/29. The National Gallery, Washington, DC, Widener Collection 1942.9.1.]

There’s so much to love about York! ♥️

The UK’s most popular city has been revealed – and it’s not London Take that, southerners.

Always so great to meet budding art historians! 💕✨

We are delighted to be welcoming Dr Lydia Fisher (University of Exeter) to the Department next week! Dr Fisher will present the Stained Glass Research School Lecture on “The Drama of Stained Glass: An Examination of the Fifteenth-Century Passion Window at St Kew”. 5pm in KG/33 at the King’s Manor ✨

Image: Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, c.1490, St Kew, Cornwall (detail)

We are all looking forward to next week’s research seminar, which will be presented by our own Prof Liz Prettejohn, on the challenges both intellectual and practical, of making a large exhibition of British art for an Italian museum organisation in the period post-Brexit and post-Covid.

British Pre-Raphaelites in Italy: Making an Exhibition in 2024
Wednesday 10 April, 5pm in the Berrick Saul Tree House

The exhibition, hosted by the Museo Civico di San Domenico in Forlì, Emilia Romagna, explores the profound impact of the Italian Renaissance on artmaking (in all media) in Great Britain from the 1840s through the 1920s. During this period, British art rose dramatically to prominence in the rapidly expanding international art world, a development that (as the exhibition demonstrates) was enabled by the study of the art of the past, and particularly of the Italian Renaissance.

The exhibition tells the story of how the art of the Italian Renaissance inspired British artists and designers to innovative artistic creation. In the process, the artists generated new perspectives and new insights into the historical Italian art that inspired them – insights that, as seen at the end of the exhibition, could galvanise Italian artists of the next generation in their turn. By 1882, when the poet and tastemaker Oscar Wilde made his famous lecture tour to North America, he was confident that the British visual arts had reached a level of excellence that itself deserved the name ‘Renaissance’. As he told his audiences: ‘I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century’.

Congratulations to Susie Beckham on the publication of her article 'Naming the Pre-Raphaelites' in the April edition of The Burlington Magazine! Well done Susie ☺️🙌🔥

Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portraits provide an important record of Elizabethan court life. We publish here a remarkable discovery which adds significantly to his known work: a large ‘cabinet’ miniature, identified by Elizabeth Goldring and Emma Rutherford as a portrait of Lady Arbella Stuart, granddaughter of Bess of Hardwick and a possible successor to the throne. The circumstances of the commission are bound up with a fascinating episode of late Elizabethan spycraft. ⁠
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So much effort has been focused on naming the horses in George Stubbs’ paintings – the defining equestrian masterpieces of the eighteenth century – that the people in his pictures have received less attention. Theodore Mould’s article helps to rectify this by identifying Philip John Nigohrus, known as Philippo, as the ‘Turkish groom’ in the artist’s celebrated painting of the Duke of Ancaster’s grey horse. A successful Ottoman Armenian merchant, Philippo imported horses to Britain and shared manufacturing secrets at the Society of Arts, London. The April issue also includes Peter Rumley’s analysis of the ballroom wing at Buckingham Palace and its Renaissance-revival decoration in the 1850s, as well as Susie Beckham’s research on the first public naming of the Pre-Raphaelites. ⁠
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Exhibition reviews include Elizabeth Pergam on the new installation of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Joseph Connors assesses the Museo della Forma Urbis, Rome. Book reviews feature Ariane Verela Braga on Owen Jones, Deborah Howard on Santa Maria Novella, Giulio Dalvit on Lorenzo Ghiberti and Larry Silver on Indecent Bodies. ⁠
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Discover the full list of content: https://bit.ly/Art-in-Britain-April24

April's Editorial: https://bit.ly/Editorial-PurchasingPower

This month's free review: https://bit.ly/beyond-the-page

Great to see Richard McClary representing History of Art in the University's shiny new video!

Research at York: a catalyst for change At the University of York we don't just observe change; we're a catalyst for it.We opened our doors in the 1960s, an era of the civil rights movement, anti-w...

This week saw the opening of the new student curated exhibitions resulting from the Group Exhibition Project module undertaken by our second year curating students. It was a great night, and we were so excited to see the results of the hard work of all of the students and staff involved! Do go along to the Spring Lane Building and take a look if you are on campus. We love our students! 🙌💕✨

Join us tomorrow at 5 in the Berrick Saul Treehouse when British Academy Global Professor Marcus Milwright will present his paper: The Great War and its Aftermath in Iraq: Contemporary Visual and Textual Perspectives. All welcome!!

Further details:

This talk considers a range of primary sources created during the Mesopotamian Campaign (1914–18) and through to the early years of the Kingdom of Iraq under British Administration (1921–32). Two groups of evidence are considered in detail.

The first comprises annotations, poems, photographs, and objects associated with Captain H. V. S. Paige, a Canadian who served in Iraq through to 1923. This varied collection provides insights into the attitudes of Allied troops to the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of the region.

The second is a set of decorated brass objects that depict events in the southern Iraqi town of Hindiyya (Tuwayrij) during the Iraq Revolt in 1920.

These complex compositions have no obvious parallel in the metalworking traditions of the Islamic Middle East and represent an attempt to employ traditional craft practices to represent aspects of mechanised warfare and the imposition of British colonial power.

These two case studies provide the basis for concluding observations about the impact of Modernity on the production of material and visual culture in the Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Wednesday 20 March 2024, 5.00pm

[image: Detail of a decorated brass platter, southern Iraq, c. 1920. Private collection. Photo: Mohammed Khaleeq]

Good morning! 🌼☀️ The view coming down to the Department from the Information Centre this morning 🤩

So proud of our hardworking students and staff! 🙌💕✨

Here is the final poster for the Group Exhibition Project exhibition which opens today at 5pm! The exhibition looks fantastic with a huge range of art works. Well done to all involved! 🙌✨👏💕

Here is the poster for the third exhibition put together by our curating students for their Group Exhibition module. The projects are all so different, and we’re super excited for the opening tomorrow, 5-7pm in the Spring Lane Building! ✨

So excited to what our talented and hard-working students have been up to! ✨

Our curating students have been working on their exhibitions for the Group Exhibition Project module, and we can’t wait to see the results at the opening this Thursday 14 March, 5 - 7pm in the Spring Lane Building 1st and 2nd Floor Atrium! Here is the poster for another one of the four exhibitions (with the others to follow).

We are so looking forward to the opening of the exhibitions prepared by our curating students as part of the Group Exhibition Project module, this Thursday 14 March, 5 - 7pm in the Spring Lane Building 1st and 2nd Floor Atrium! In no particular order, here is a taster of one of the four exhibitions (with the others to follow).

We are very proud of our line up of speakers at the ‘Production, Transmission & Interpretation’ conference, and are excited that the closing keynote lecture will be presented by ✨Marcus Milwright✨British Academy Global Professor, Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology, Department of Art History and Visual Studies, University of Victoria, Canada, on ‘Learning from mistakes: craft practice and the interpretation of early Islamic art’.

You can register for tickets for Day 3 of the conference, at a cost of £5, here: tinyurl.com/46effauz