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Department of History of Art

 

Biography

At Cambridge, I teach modern and contemporary art across the History of Art Tripos, and convene a module on Contemporary Art, Community and Collaboration. I am the author of Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation (Yale, 2023) and the co-editor of Cecilia Vicuña, Saborami: An Expanded Facsimile Edition (Book Works, 2024) with Luke Roberts. My research has focused on histories of feminism and art, and more broadly on radical forms of relation and the politics of togetherness in modern and contemporary art.

I am also curator, contemporary programmes at Kettle’s Yard, where I have curated or co-curated exhibitions on Louise Bourgeois, Julie Mehretu, Ian Giles, Rose Garrard, Lubaina Himid, Issam Kourbaj, Linder, Sutapa Biswas, Howardena Pindell, and Megan Rooney. In November 2023, I co-curated the major group exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends with Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner and forthcoming in March 2025, is Here is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis and Survival.

I have written on numerous artists including Helen Chadwick, Rose English, Rose Garrard, Eva Hesse, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Alexis Hunter, Suzanne Lacy, Linder, Rosemary Mayer, Julie Mehretu, Howardena Pindell, Cecilia Vicuña, Monica Sjöö, Jo Spence, Hannah Wilke and Li Yuan-chia, in addition to publishing articles in Feminist Review, Women: A Cultural Review, Tate Papers and Art History and contributing to exhibition catalogues including The Infinite Woman (Fondation Carmignac, 2024), The Time of Our Lives (Drawing Room, 2024), Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in Britain 1970–1990 (Tate, 2023) and Empowerment: Art and Feminisms (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2022). I also regularly write art criticism for Burlington Contemporary.

Since 2021, I have been a co-Director of Cambridge Visual Culture (https://www.cvc.cam.ac.uk/) – which aims to connect researchers and practitioners working on the visual throughout Cambridge – and a member of the Higher Education Committee of the Association for Art History.

Research

My research has focused on histories of feminism and art (broadly understood), as well as methodologies of feminist art histories. She is committed to an inclusive feminism, as well as to researching adjacent political and epistemological struggles. Her book Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation focused on the politics of collaboration and collectivity, which is another research interest. 

I welcome applications for graduate study on feminism and art, art and political struggle in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, histories of women artists, trans studies and art, queer art and theory, artist publishing, alternative institutional models, artist moving image and contemporary British and American art.

I have also supervised and co-supervised graduate students in English, Gender Studies and Film and Screen Studies. 

I am currently co-I on the AHRC-IRC-funded oral history project Feminist Art Making Histories and was a co-organiser of the research network Groupwork: Art and Feminism with Dr Rachel Warriner and Dr Catherine Grant. 

Publications

Key publications: 

Books

Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, October 2023.

A Woman’s Place, London: Raven Row, 2017.

 

Co-edited and Edited Books

Cecilia Vicuña, Saborami: An Expanded Facsimile Edition, co-edited with Luke Roberts, London: Bookworks, March 2024.

Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends, co-edited with Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, November 2023. 

Sutapa Biswas: Lumen, Cambridge and Gateshead: Kettle’s Yard and BALTIC, 2021.

Linderism, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard and Koenig Books, 2020. 

With Devika Singh, Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2019.

With Lucy Gosling, Helena Reckitt, Hilary Robinson, Art of Feminism, London and San Francisco: Tate and Chronicle Books, 2018. [responsible for: ‘Defining Feminism 1960–1989’.] [Translated into French and published by Hugo in 2019; Russian edition, 2021; second, expanded edition in English to be released in 2022]. 

With Jo Applin & Catherine Spencer, London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960–1980, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

 

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

‘Candace Hill-Montgomery Against Containment’, Art History, vol.46, no.1 (February 2023), pp. 38-67. 

‘Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics’, Women: A Cultural Review, vol.30, no.3 Special Issue ‘Danger: Women Reading’ edited by Victoria Horne, 2019: 280–296. 

‘I’ll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours’, in the ‘Mediating Collaboration’ special edition of Tate Papers, edited by Catherine Spencer, Amy Tobin and Harry Weeks, no. 25, Spring 2016. http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/25/i-show-you-m...

‘Moving Pictures: Intersections between Art, Film and Feminism in the 1970s’ in MIRAJ, Feminisms Special Issue, edited by Catherine Elwes, vol.4, no.1–2, Spring 2016: 118–135.

 

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

‘On Feminism, Art and Collaboration’ in A Companion to Feminist Art, edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Buszek, Blackwell, 2019. 

‘Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair (1978)’ in Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and British Experimental Film in the 1970s edited by Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey, I.B. Taurus, 2017. [2nd edition, Bloomsbury 2021].

With Victoria Horne, ‘An Unfinished Revolution in Art Historiography, Or How to Write a Feminist Art History?’ Feminist Review, no.107, 2014: 75–83. Republished in Feminism and Art History Now: Writing, Curating and Caring for the Past, IB Taurus, 2017. [2nd edition, Bloomsbury 2022].

With Fiona Anderson, ‘Collaboration is Not an Alternative: Artists Working Together in London and New York, 1974–1981’ in Collaboration and its Discontents, Courtauld Books Online, 2017. http://courtauld.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/cbo/Chapter%206_Collabora...(Dis)Contents.pdf

With Clarissa Jacob, ‘Her Final Project’ in Jo Spence: The Final Project, London: Ridinghouse, 2013.

 

Other Publications

‘The Sociality of the Spectacle: on Berlin’, Rose English, exhibition catalogue, Salzburg, June 2024.

‘Genealogies of Disobdience’, The Infinite Woman, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Carmignac, April 2024.

‘Life Drawing’, The Time of Our Lives, exhibition catalogue, London: Drawing Room, April 2024.

‘Little Circles: Women, Art and Collaboration’, Women in Revolt, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate, November 2023.

‘Monica Sjöö’s Cosmic Feminism’, Monica Sjöö, exhibition catalogue, Oxford and Stockholm: Modern Art Oxford and Moderna Museet, July 2023.

‘London: An Essay on Berlin’, exhibition text for Rose English’s exhibition Berlin, HEIRLOOM centre for art and archives, Copenhagen, Denmark, January–April 2023.

‘Ketty La Rocca: My Words and You’, for Ketty La Rocca, London: Brewer Street Press, November 2022. 

‘Speaking Bitterness’, Empowerment: Planetary feminisms, edited by Regine Epp, exhibition catalogue, [German and English editions]. Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2022.

‘Howardena Pindell: Surface Tension’, Howardena Pindell: A New Language, edited by Fiona Bradley, Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 2021. 

‘Tender Ropes for Queen Green’, exhibition text for Susie Green: Queen Green, Crescent Arts: Scarborough, 2021.

‘Sutapa Biswas: Blind Light’, Sutapa Biswas, Cambridge and Gateshead: Kettle’s Yard and BALTIC, 2021.

‘Hesse/ Wilke’, Erotic Abstraction: Hesse and Wilke, edited by Eleanor Nairne, New York, Acquavella and Rivoli, 2020. 

‘Linderism: The Red Period’, Linderism, Cambridge and London: Kettle’s Yard and Koenig Books, 2020.

‘Feminist Sisterhood: Difference in the Women’s Art Movement’, Histórias das mulheres, Histórias feministas, edited by Andre Mesquita. Sāo Paolo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2019 [Portuguese].

Sfumato Again’, Julie Mehretu: Prints and Drawings, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2019. 

‘Approach to Fear’, Alexis Hunter, London: Goldsmiths, 2018.

With Catherine Elwes, ‘An Interview with Rose Garrard’, in MIRAJ, February 2018.

‘On Charity’, Kate Davis, Charity. London: Lux, 2017. 

‘Collaboration, Art and Activism, 1970–1981’, in Jacqueline Morreau, London: Nunnery Gallery, 2017.

‘The Internationalism of Feminist Art in 1970s Britain’ in British Art Studies, vol.1, no.1 2015. http://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-1/conversation

Associate Professor in the History of Art
Curator, Contemporary Programmes, Kettle’s Yard
Fellow of Newnham College
Director of Studies in History of Art at Newnham College
Dr Amy  Tobin

Contact Details

01223 330462

Affiliations