Session 3B : Bourdon Lecture Theatre / Bourdon Board Room
Saturday June 10th, 2023 : 09:30 – 12:00
Overview
Faced with the current precarity of the arts within Higher Education and the impact of neo- liberal ideologies on art schools, our gaze has turned rearwards to explore the histories, experimental pedagogies and radical practices to emerge within, between and around northern UK art schools from the mid 1970s — 1990s.For the conference we propose to convene two participatory workshops to bring individuals from diverse institutions, positions and perspectives into dialogue, to ask: How might a reflection on these histories support or challenge our understanding of the social, critical, moral and ethical value of an art school education in the present climate?
Speakers
Gavin Butt
Gavin Butt was trained as a fine artist and art historian. Gavin is a writer, curator and filmmaker. Across his diverse output, he is interested in how the social worlds and aesthetic preoccupations of visual artists can be connected, sometimes in surprising ways, to those within popular music, queer culture and performance. His latest book No Machos or Pop Stars is a detailed cultural history of the subversive influence of UK art school on popular music culture, telling the story of how fine art painters and performers became post-punk and pop music pioneers. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Ysanne Holt
Ysanne Holt is Emerita Professor in Art History at Northumbria University. She has longstanding interests in the visual and material culture of the UK north, most especially in its rural environments. Related publications include ‘Place on the Border and the LYC Museum and Art Gallery,’ The Routledge Handbook on Place, 2020 and Co-editor, with David Martin Jones and Owain Jones, Visual Culture in the Northern UK Archipelago: Imagining Islands, 2018. She is currently completing her monograph, ‘Dark skies, bogs and watery borders’ on the entangled interrelations between forms of cultural and creative practice and the material resources of the Anglo-Scottish border region.
Matthew Hearn
Matthew Hearn is a curator and Associate Lecturer in Arts at Northumbria University where he coordinates and curates the exhibition programme at Gallery North. He has a long-standing interest in archives, and his PhD developed in collaboration with Locus+ Archive, explored the regional and international significance of a 30 year programme of time and place-based programming developed in the North East of England. In 2021 he co-curated the exhibition, Sally Madge: Acts of Reclamation and co-authored a paper, Sally Madge: acts of reclamation and renewal between site, studio, archive and gallery, published in Journal of Visual Art Practice with Ysanne Holt.