This event launches the research network Group Work: Contemporary Art and Feminism, which is a collaboration between Dr Rachel Warriner (Courtauld Institute of Art), Dr Amy Tobin (University of Cambridge) and Dr Catherine Grant (Goldsmiths). With a focus on feminist practice, this research network examines the significance of group work, through a range of events in order to consider the implications of approaching the art world from the point of view of the relationships, collaborations and networks that support artistic production, display and reception. This event introduces the project and will include short papers from the network founders.
Speaker bios:
Catherine Grant is Senior Lecturer in the Art and Visual Cultures Departments at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently working on the re-enactment of feminist histories in contemporary art. The project includes the essays “Fans of Feminism: re-writing histories of second-wave feminism” (2011) and a “A Time of One’s Own” (2016), both published in the Oxford Art Journal. She is also working on an edited collection entitled Fandom as Methodology with Kate Random Love, due out in 2019, and is the co-editor of Girls! Girls! Girls! (2011) and Creative Writing and Art History (2012).
Amy Tobin is Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Curator at Kettle’s Yard. Her PhD research focused on art and feminism in Britain and North America in the 1970s, and particularly at group work and collaboration between women. Her research has been published in British Art Studies, MIRAJ and Tate Papers and in books including Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (IB Tauris, 2017), Feminism and Art History Now (IB Tauris, 2017), The Art of Feminism (Chronicle and Tate, 2018) and A Companion to Feminist Art (Blackwell, 2019). In 2017 she wrote and edited 14 Radnor Terrace: A Woman’s Place for the exhibition 56 Artillery Lane at Raven Row in London, this year her co-edited book (with Jo Applin and Catherine Spencer) London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks was published by Pennsylvania State University Press. She is currently working on a book on feminism, art and sisterhood.
Rachel Warriner is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research focuses on feminist activism in the New York art world during the 1970s, considering how collective actions supported early feminist art practice. She has published work in The Irish University Review, British and Irish Journal of Innovative, Artefact Journal and in the edited collection Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2016). Her book, Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art is forthcoming from I.B. Tauris.