Workshop
Art School Archives
2:15–18:00
Town House, Kingston University Penrhyn Road Campus
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By the early twentieth century, women constituted over forty percent of new entrants to the sculpture profession, marking a substantial increase in the number who had completed formal training in the previous century. The establishment of the Slade School of Art in 1871 made history by offering women an art education on equal terms to their male counterparts and in some institutions women even outnumbered men among groups of art students.
Given the large number of women who undertook training in art schools, the archives of such institutions provide a crucial resource for locating women’s sculptural practices. In this workshop, held at Kingston University’s Archive in the RIBA Stirling Prize 2021 Town House building, speakers Fran Lloyd, Dayna Miller (both Kingston School of Art, Kingston University), Liz Bruchet (University College London) and Althea Greenan (Women’s Art Library) will discuss the role of art school archives in research and the structures of support provided by such institutions.
Programme
14:15
Welcome from Fran Lloyd and introduction to the Kingston University Archive
14:30
Althea Greenan: Introduction to the Women’s Art Library
14:45
Liz Bruchet: Introduction to the Slade Archive Project
15:00
Discussion
15:30–16:00
Refreshments
16:00–17:00
Archive handling session with University Archivist Dayna Miller and Fran Lloyd
17:00–18:00
Wine reception in Town House Foyer
About the speakers
Dr Liz Bruchet is Senior Lecturer in Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies, University College London (UCL) and Honorary Research Associate, Slade School of Fine Art. Her research focuses on the records and recordkeeping practices of artists and visual arts organisations, and the interconnections between archival and curatorial practices. Prior to her current role, she was Archive Curator and researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art. Recent publications include an open access archival feature in British Art Studies, co-authored with Ming Tiampo, ‘Slade, London, Asia: Contrapuntal Histories between Imperialism and Decolonization 1945–1989 (Part 1)’ (Issue 20, July 2021, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-20/tiampobruchet); and ‘Archival finding aids and perceptual frames: tracing material contact points through Stephen Chaplin’s Slade Archive Reader’, in The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context, eds. Sue Breakell and Wendy Russell (Routledge, forthcoming 2022).
Dr Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths University of London curating the Women’s Art Library collection. Her work with the collection began in 1989 as a volunteer with the Women Artists Slide Library, the artists’ organisation that became the Women’s Art Library in 1993. She now works with artists, students, and academic researchers to help realise new art and curatorial projects that develop alongside the collection. She has written on the work of women artists since the 1980s publishing reviews, interviews and creative pieces in a range of publications from art magazines to academic journals. Her recent doctoral research focused on the Women’s Art Library slide collection and aspects of digitisation to ask: What can an artists’ slide collection do besides represent artwork? Her findings recover the text produced by slide-making and the feminist net-work that the slide collection continues to reproduce today.
Fran Lloyd is Professor of Art History and Co-Director of the Visual & Material Culture Research Centre based at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London. Her research engages with the history and practice of modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on artistic networks and the production and reception of sculpture. She established the Kingston School of Art Archive Project: archiveksa.org
Researching Women in Sculpture
Researching Women in Sculpture reflects upon women’s contribution to the field of sculpture, investigating archival and collecting practices that have historically obscured work by women and suggesting strategies for how these might be addressed moving forward.