Announcing the Recipients of the 2022 New Narratives Awards

The Paul Mellon Centre is delighted to report on the three winners of this year’s inaugural New Narratives awards scheme, which is designed to support students and researchers from a diverse range of backgrounds, and to encourage new perspectives on British art and visual culture of all periods.

Early Career Fellowship: Jareh Das

Dr Jareh Das is a researcher, writer and curator who lives and works between West Africa and the UK. Her interests in (global) modern and contemporary art are cross-disciplinary, although her understanding is filtered through the lens of performance art, which informs both her academic and curatorial work. During her fellowship, Jareh will examine post colonial legacies in Nigerian and British studio pottery through interactions between Ladi Kwali and Michael Cardew. Jareh’s most recent curated exhibition, Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics and Contemporary Art (Two Temple Place, London and York Art Gallery from 24 June–18 September 2022) surveyed how ceramics have been disrupted, questioned and reimagined by Black women over the last seventy years, beginning with the seminal Nigerian potter, Ladi Kwali.

Jareh has contributed to a wide range of international publications, online and in print, including Artsy, DOMUS, Wallpaper*, Ocula, Bomb Magazine, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Leonardo, X-TRA, Crafts Magazine and ARTnews.

Doctoral Scholarship: Nicholas Brown

Nicholas Brown is a librarian and doctoral candidate researching Black British artists and print culture, with particular attention to independent magazine publishing. In his PhD, to be taken at University of the Arts London, Nicholas will critically examine how the magazines produced by and about Black artists and writers in the twentieth century functioned as key sites of contestation, fostering new positions and understandings of how visual arts intersect with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and the legacies of colonialism.

Nicholas has managed a variety of libraries and archives, including the Stuart Hall Library at Iniva (The Institute of International Visual Arts), The British Museum, Hayward Gallery, Christie’s Education and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. He was a librarian at The Courtauld Institute of Art and Associate Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Nicholas is a member of the British Art Network’s Black British Art group and has contributed to the Postcolonial Print Cultures Network.

MA/MPhil Studentship: Peter Miller

Peter Miller is currently completing a BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. He will be pursuing an MPhil in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Cambridge, beginning in October.

Peter’s MPhil thesis project – “Ours is a beautiful landscape”: Aubrey Williams, Ronald Moody, and Transnational Caribbean Ecology – seeks to unravel the complicated relationships that this Guyanese painter and Jamaican sculptor had with the natural world. The thesis will be wide ranging in its ecocritical approach; Peter is interested in the affective response to environmental destruction in Williams’ paintings as well as the ethical implications of Moody’s larger sculptures, carved entirely out of organic materials. Situating Williams’ and Moody’s ecologies alongside one another through their shared experience of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), his research attempts to uncover the influence that living and working in London had on their relationship to the planet.

Peter recently co-curated Intimacies, After Vallotton, an exhibition of Paul Majek’s paintings and Sam Spencer’s dramatic monologues at the Old Fire Station gallery in Oxford.