The School of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art

Head of School of Fine Art: Professor Rebecca Fortnum

The School of Fine Art offers expert teaching in Fine Art and related disciplines with internationally recognised teaching staff, a stimulating intellectual environment and a specialist and interdisciplinary orientation. Our School is a diverse international community where artists, writers, curators and researchers exchange ideas, thoughts, and creative approaches to new knowledge and practice in a city known for the arts and creativity.

We offer BA, MFA and MLitt programmes in contemporary fine art (including Painting and Printmaking, Fine Art Photography, Sculpture and Environmental Art), curatorial practice, and interdisciplinary art writing, in a creative atmosphere that draws on both professional and research contexts, creating events, exhibitions, talks and symposia. Our MPhil and PhD programmes offer specialist supervision in fine art, curatorial studies, visual and material culture, art and design history, criticism, art writing and interdisciplinary writing.  We are joined regularly by local and international visiting lecturers across all programmes and our unique Friday Event series includes an impressive range of guest speakers and events each year. Recent keynote lectures, masterclasses and workshops have been led by guests including Array Collective, Kate Briggs, Kimathi Donkor, Jack Halberstam, Jasleen Kaur, Hew Locke, Maggie Nelson, Ingrid Pollard, Morgan Quaintance, Tai Shani, Marina Vishmidt, and many others.

Founded in 1845, The Glasgow School of Art is one of the few remaining independent art schools in the UK. With a proven history of producing some of the world’s most influential and successful artists, designers and architects, the GSA’s studio-based specialist, practice-led education draws talented individuals with a shared passion and concern for visual culture from all over the world.

The Glasgow School of Art is one of the top public universities in Glasgow, United Kingdom. It is ranked #11 in QS WUR Ranking by Subject 2022. All GSA degree programmes are validated by the University of Glasgow. Established in 1451, the University of Glasgow is a member of the Russell Group of leading UK research universities and a founder member of Universitas 21, an international grouping of universities dedicated to setting worldwide standards for higher education.

Professor Rebecca Fortnum 

Professor of Fine Art and Head of the School of Fine Art

The Glasgow School of Art

Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer and academic. Fortnum studied at Camberwell College of Art (Foundation), Corpus Christi College, Oxford (BA English), Newcastle University (MFA) and Kingston University (PhD). She has had solo shows at the Henry Moore Institute, Semmer, Berlin, Freud Museum and the V&A’s Museum of Childhood, as well as numerous group shows including most recently, ‘Chronicles’, 9a Projects, Todmorden, ‘Motherline’, Flowers East, London; ‘Sleepy Heads’, Blyth Gallery, London; ‘49.5’, 601 Art Space New York; ‘Phantom Limn’, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. A monograph, Self Contained, was published by RGAP in 2013. In 2019 she was elected Visiting Research Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, where she developed her painting project, A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, published as a book by Slimvolume in 2020. She was the 2021-22 Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute working on Les Praticiennes, an exhibition based around the women sculptors in Rodin’s circle.

Fortnum has held an Abbey Award at the British School in Rome, individual awards from the Arts Council of England, the British Council and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation amongst others, and has received research funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her book of interviews, Contemporary British Women Artists: In Their Own Words, was published in 2007 and On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, a book of essays that examines contemporary artists’ processes, which she co-edited with Lizzie Fisher, was published in 2013. She is the Founding Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Painting published by Intellect.  Her most recent book, A Companion to Contemporary Drawing (2020), co-edited with Kelly Chorpening, includes her chapter, ‘A Dirty Double Mirror: Drawing, Autobiography and Feminism’, which explores the feminist potential of the ‘autographical’ in work by Frances Stark, Emma Talbot and Nicola Tyson.

She has been a Reader in Fine Art at University of the Arts London and Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University and at the Royal College of Art, where she led research for the School of Arts and Humanities until 2021.  She is currently Head of the School of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art.

Professor Magnus Quaife 

Professor of Artist Pedagogy/Professori Taiteilijapedagogiikka

Academy of Fine Art, University of the Arts Helsinki

Magnus Quaife is the Professor of Fine Art Pedagogy at the Academy of Fine Art, University of the Arts, Helsinki. He is an artist, educator, and pedagogical researcher. His research focuses on how the experiences of the art school both as a student and a member of staff inform the development of different artist’s pedagogies and the assumptions they contain. He is a founding director of the organisation Teaching Painting which explores the historical, pedagogical and shifting methods through which the discipline is addressed in higher education. Teaching Painting develops networks of artists and educators and conducts research through curating exhibitions, convening conferences, symposia, and publishing. The organisation has worked with partners including the Royal Academy of the Arts, The Royal College of Art, the Freelands Foundation, and the Whitworth, and academics from across Europe, Canada, China, Russia, and the US. Quaife worked at Manchester School of Art for over 15 years and has been visiting lecturer at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art, York St John University, the University of Lincoln, and the University of West England.

His artistic practice has been described as that of a conceptual artist interested in paint and as being connected through an approach that is akin to an archaeology of the modern and contemporary. He is represented by the Workplace Foundation’s Community of Artists, Newcastle, UK.

He received a Doctorate from the Manchester Institute for Research in Art and Design, a Master’s in Fine Art form Manchester School of Art, a Bachelor’s in Painting from Chelsea College of Art and Design, and Foundation Diploma from Manchester Metropolitan University.

Steering Committee

Professor Jaana Erkkilä-Hill (University of the Arts Helsinki)

Dr Elizabeth Fisher (Northumbria University)

Professor Rebecca Fortnum (The Glasgow School of Art)

Dr Marianne Greated (The Glasgow School of Art)

Dr Luis Guerra (University of the Arts Helsinki)

Dr Roddy Hunter (The Glasgow School of Art)

Rory O’Neill (GSA Student Association)

Professor Magnus Quaife (University of the Arts Helsinki)

Dr Timothy Smith (University of the Arts Helsinki)

Dr Henry Ward (Freelands Foundation)

Research in SoFA at the Glasgow School of Art is inclusive of all staff working in the school. A broad range of disciplines, methods and concerns are represented in high quality individual research, through the school’s research networks and collaborative and interdisciplinary projects within and beyond the school. The school is developing a significant profile as a leader in practice-led research through its programme of international conferences, research exhibitions and publications’ series. Within the past year SoFA has hosted the international conferences ‘What’s the Matter: Queer Materiality and Communities of Making’ (June 2022), ‘Class Matters’ (May 2023) and ‘How Artists’ Teach’ (June 2023). The school’s Research Networks are as follows: 

 Queer Materialities 

• A group comprised of SoFA staff members and external research practitioners promoting practice-led methods that invest in shape-shifting, mimesis and queer identity as they meet and transform through material handling. 

Feminist Histories of the Present/Future 

• Network for art practice and research exploring and making women’s creative legacies. This group aims its findings at younger generations of women.  

Reading Landscapes 

• Enabling critical discourse around the overarching theme of ‘Reading Landscape’ in its relationship to Fine Art and other disciplines. 

Curating and Exhibition making 

• Exploring different forms of curatorial practice and exhibition making, with particular reference to innovative relations to archives and working with contemporary artists.  

Fictionauts 

• Using fictioning as a research method and output across and with a range of disciplines and practices. 

Open

• Facilitating conversations on other potential areas of research development within SoFA.  
• Provision for the spontaneous and the new.