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York's British Art Research School, judged `world-leading' in RAE 2008, aims to change the way key cultural institutions represent British art. To advance this aim we have fostered partnerships with museums and galleries at local, national, and international levels. The partnerships have influenced curatorial practices through:
These initiatives have helped partners to display and promote a significantly wider range of British art and to generate new kinds of interpretation for larger and more diverse publics.
Research at the University of Bristol on the international contexts of British art has made a distinctive contribution to a renaissance of British art studies that began in the late 1980s. Over the past five years, scholars at Bristol have worked with museums in London, the regions and overseas to engage the widest possible audience in fresh thinking about British art. Exhibitions and catalogue essays informed by their research have raised awareness of individual artists and changed public and critical perceptions of British art as a whole. They have also brought many benefits to the museum partners, attracting visitors, generating income and enhancing the museums' understanding of their own collections. Some exhibitions have inspired additional collaborations which have fed back into research and further extended audiences for British art.
Dr. Miller, Professor Owen and Professor Wilks' research underpins Cultural Memory studies. It spans several decades and has engaged with and impacted upon academia and society via numerous forms of dissemination such as monographs, chapters in books, journal articles, broadcasts, exhibitions, websites, conference papers and public talks. Cultural Memory is a relatively new area of study that examines, and seeks to raise awareness of, the way in which society, the individual and cultural production is reconstructed via the remaining material evidence. Hence it focuses equally on material evidence and the problematical way in which it is often distorted by contemporary filters.
Through public engagement across print and broadcast media, and a series of high-profile collaborations with world-leading arts institutes, our research has stimulated new thinking about the purpose of arts broadcasting over the past 40 years. It has refocused attention on two neglected TV landmarks, Civilisation (1969) and Ways of Seeing (1972), encouraging broadcasters and cultural institutions to consider beauty and civilisation as inclusive rather than elitist concepts, a debate that succeeded in engaging new public audiences. There was economic benefit to the National Gallery and the British Film Institute and, not least, interest in the research findings led to the BBC rebroadcasting Civilisation in 2011.
The artist John Piper, and his wife, the editor, anthologist and librettist Myfanywy Piper were key figures within the cultural field of mid-twentieth-century Britain. The research on which this case study is based brought to public attention their reclaiming for British art a sense of place, national identity and belonging. Through her books, essays, public lectures, journalism, appearances at literary and arts festivals and on radio and television Frances Spalding's research on the Pipers and their contribution to British culture has made a major impact on public life. The research has influenced cultural, heritage, and media organisations, directly altered policy on conservation of heritage, and shaped the cultural understanding of informed audiences, both in Britain and abroad.
Ysanne Holt was Academic Advisor and Commissioning Editor for Tate's Camden Town Group in Context project, funded through the Getty Foundation's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative which aims to transform how museums disseminate information about their collections. Holt undertook and commissioned new research into the Group's artworks and their broader contexts. Impacts derived from the project's online catalogue include increased awareness for national and international public and specialists; and improved access to the art and its contexts via a multi-platform open access facility. In addition, the project has influenced the Tate's Digital Strategy and led to the creation of the new post of Digital Editor within Tate's Research Department.
There are two ways in which Erle's research on William Blake, Physiognomy and text-image relationships have achieved public impact. First, a display and a Scholar's Morning on "Blake and Physiognomy" at Tate Britain (2010-11) and there were also invitations to give public lectures for "Haus der Romantik", a Literature Museum specialising on Romanticism in Marburg (Germany) and for the Blake Society, a London-based but international organisation of Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Second, an online-exhibition on Lord Alfred Tennyson's copy of Blake's Job for the Tennyson Research Centre (2012-13) and a display on Blake, Tennyson and Anne Gilchrist in Lincoln Public Library.
The primary impact of the research in the exhibition and the catalogue entitled The Bruce Lacey Experience is the Tate's commitment to acquiring additional pieces of Lacey's work (the gallery presently owns two works) and to purchase Lacey's archive. The exhibition that David Mellor curated at the Camden Arts Centre (CAC) jointly with Jeremy Deller also directly affected contemporary art curators and the public by influencing outputs on Lacey in film: both the film of the artist made by Deller, and Lacey's own films, released as a DVD set through the British Film Institute (BFI) in conjunction with the exhibition.
The impact comes from Ekserdjian's authentication and attribution of Renaissance paintings and the curatorship of international exhibitions, both of which have had substantial financial impact on institutions and individuals involved in the art market, in particular the auction house sector, galleries and museums. This also includes cultural impacts on the art-loving public by introducing them to newly-discovered and attributed artworks which might previously have never been exhibited publicly and by offering innovative ways of exhibiting and understanding masterpieces gathered from around the globe.
The impact of Professor Taylor's work in interpreting modern and contemporary art has taken place on two complementary levels: on the one hand the lucid and accessible exposition, for a wide international reading public, of some of the most difficult, intractable, or provocative works of recent and contemporary art; and on the other, more specialist readings, again for an international reading public, of key tendencies in the broader range of modern art, from Cubism to the present day. Wide readership across Asia, Europe, and the United States has secured increased public understanding of art, and has influenced both policy and art practice.