Conference: Writing Materials – Women of Letters from the Enlightenment to Modernity

Friday 30th November 2012, Victoria and Albert Museum, Hochhauser Auditorium, Sackler Centre London, 10.30am

From salons to closets and glamour to grammar, to quills, desks and inkwells, this one day conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum will explore the tools and environments of women’s writing between the 18th to the 20th centuries and aims to create new connections between texts and material objects. Speakers Include: Peter Stallybrass, Marcia Pointon, Dena Goodman, Elizabeth Eger and Angela McShane. The conference is held in association with Kings College London, University of Swansea and the AHRC Montagu Letters Network and Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. This conference is the second part of a two-day event. Kings College London will be hosting the first day events on Thursday 29 November, which requires separate registration through Kings College.

In Translation: Women, Migration and Britishness

Manchester Art Gallery: Saturday 25 February 2012 – Saturday 23 February 2013, free

This exhibition is part of a major project working with women who have migrated to the North-West of England from all over the world. The women, drawn from a range of diverse backgrounds, are working with artists’ collective UHC (Ultimate Holding Company) to co-curate a display featuring and inspired by Manchester City Galleries’ collection of Empire Marketing Board Posters.

These posters were produced by the Empire Marketing Board, a promotional body set up by the British government in 1926. They are large, colourful lithographic prints, which are now regarded as a rare example of peace time government propaganda. Each set of posters promotes a way of thinking about the Empire – for example, as an eager market for British exports, or as a bounteous source of produce for the British tea table. Any darker ideas of ruthless colonial domination were kept at bay by the sheer brilliance of the posters. The poster campaign ran nationwide on Britain’s streets from 1926 to 1933.

Display: Thin Black Line(s) @Tate

Thin Black Line(s): Display at Tate Britain, until 18th March 2012, admission free

The Thin Black Line(s) display at Tate Britain focuses on the contribution of Black and Asian women artists to British art in the 1980s. Taking as its starting point three seminal exhibitions curated by artist Lubaina Himid in London from 1983 to 1985, the display charts the coming to voice of a radical generation of British artists who challenged their collective invisibility in the art world and engaged in their art with the wider social and political issues of 1980s Britain and the world.

In the early 1980s three exhibitions in London curated by Lubaina Himid – Five Black Women at the Africa Centre (1983), Black Women Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre (1983-4) and The Thin Black Line at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (1985) – marked the arrival on the British art scene of a radical generation of young Black and Asian women artists. They challenged their collective invisibility in the art world and engaged with the social, cultural, political and aesthetic issues of the time. This display features a selection of key works by some of these artists. At their core is a conceptual reframing of the image of black and Asian women themselves. Drawing on multiple artistic languages and media, these works repositioned the black female presence from the margins to the centre of debates about representation and art making.

Most of the works on display have been lent by the Arts Council and from artists’ private collections. They and local museums were more proactive at the time than national museums such as Tate in collecting these works. The participants in the three exhibitions were: Brenda Agard, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Chila Burman, Jean Campbell, Jennifer Comrie, Margaret Cooper, Elizabeth Eugene, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Mumtaz Karimjee, Cherry Lawrence, Leslee Wills, Houria Niati, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, Marlene Smith, Maud Sulter and Andrea Telman.

This display has been devised by artist Lubaina Himid MBE, Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire, with curator Paul Goodwin. It is part of an ongoing series of one-room Focus Displays that take a look at an artist, theme or period of British art, using works from the Tate Collection.

 

 

Call for Papers: Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies

5-7th July 2012, The School of the Arts, Loughborough University

Home/Land is an interdisciplinary conference at The School of Arts, Loughborough University that asks what dialogues might be engendered, globally and locally, around concepts of citizenship and belonging by engaging with women’s photographic practices. In the terms of this conference, ‘photographic practices’ may include both historical and contemporary work, still and/or moving image, derived from fine art and social science contexts and embracing genres such as portraiture, landscape, documentary and installation.

Call for Articles: English Catholic Women Writers 1660-1829

Special Issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, edited by Anna Battigelli and Laura M. Stevens

Abstracts due by 1 June 2011

This special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature will focus on English Catholic women’s imaginative work as it was inflected by Catholicism or through self-identification with a Catholic minority culture during the long eighteenth century. Most of the essays will concentrate on women writers, but proposals for essays on other forms of women’s imaginative work, particularly the visual and domestic arts, are welcome. All essays should be informed by the rich repository of recent work in early modern Catholic studies. Articles on eighteenth-century Catholic women from the British Isles, including exiled English women working abroad or in the colonies, are sought exploring topics including, though not limited to, the following: