New Assistant Curator at Henry Moore Institute

We’re delighted to announce that Sean Ketteringham has been appointed Henry Moore Institute’s new Assistant Curator.

Sean is a researcher and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art. He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford before joining Henry Moore Institute as a postdoctoral researcher in 2023. His doctoral project examined the relationship between British imperial decline and English national identity through domestic art, architecture, and literature in the mid-twentieth century. A monograph based on this work, titled Architectures of Identity: Imperial Decline and the Homes of English Modernism, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

His research and curatorial interests also include the avant-garde, anarchism, word and image, architectural heritage, locality, landscape, and land art. His curatorial work has included projects with Flat Time House, the Courtauld Gallery collection of works on paper, and the National Trust, while his academic writing has appeared in Modernist Cultures, Sculpture Journal, and Notes and Queries. In recent years, Sean has held fellowships at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Centre for British Studies), the University of Oxford, and the University of Texas (Harry Ransom Centre).

In parallel with his role as Assistant Curator, Sean will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre in 2025-26, developing new research into folk art, decolonisation, and anthropological thought in postwar Britain. Sean will also participate in the British Art Network’s Curatorial Forum at the Yale Centre for British Art in October this year.

Sean’s first exhibition for Henry Moore Institute will be Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time, which will open in the Study Gallery on 18 July 2025. Accompanying this exhibition, he will lead a symposium exploring Anti-Monumentality and the Afterlives of ‘Land Art’ in Britain at the Institute on 22 October 2025.