This event focuses on Barbara McCullough’s pioneering short film Water Ritual 1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) including a screening of the film. Rizvana Bradley (History of Art and African-American Studies, Yale University) will give a presentation on the work, introducing its themes and ideas. This will be followed by a conversation with Amy Tobin (Kettle’s Yard and History of Art, University of Cambridge) which will consider its relationship to feminism, collectivity, and ecology.
This will be the second event of the Group Work Network which considers the ways in which collectivity and collaboration supports practice. It is kindly sponsored by the Centre for American Art, Courtauld Institute of Art. Group Work events are co-organised by Catherine Grant, Amy Tobin and Rachel Warriner.
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of the History of Art and African-American Studies at Yale University. She received her PhD from Duke University, B.A. from Williams College, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study program. Bradley’s research intersects with anticolonial politics, feminist and gender studies, continental philosophy, postcolonial theory, and aesthetic theory. Her forthcoming book manuscript was awarded a Creative Capital Arts Writer’s Grant, and other writing appears in: Film Quarterly, Black Camera, TDR: The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Parkett, and Art in America. She has contributed to catalogues for the New Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, ICA Philadelphia, Art Basel, the Berlin Biennale, and Whitechapel Gallery, London.
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.
Organised by Dr Catherine Grant (Goldsmiths) Dr Amy Tobin (Kettle’s Yard and Cambridge University) and Dr Rachel Warriner (The Courtauld Institute of Art).