Past Events

Kim Lim at Hepworth Wakefield: Curator’s Tour and Curatorial Workshop

ECRN Events – Abi Shapiro, Jonathan Vernon

  • 31 May 2024
  • 10:30 – 1:00 pm
  • This is an event for Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN) members only. You can find out more about the network here.
  • Hepworth Wakefield

Join us for a Curator’s Tour of Kim Lim: Space Rhythm & Light at the Hepworth Wakefield – the last chance to see this important exhibition before it closes on 2 June.

Organised in collaboration with the Henry Moore Institute as part of their research season on the legacy of Constantin Brâncuşi in Britain, we will be guided around the exhibition by its curator Abi Shapiro. The tour will be followed by an informal workshop with Abi and Jonathan Vernon in which we will discuss the conception of the exhibition, its curatorial challenges and opportunities, Abi’s selection of works and the art-historical framing of Lim in the context of post-war British sculpture. Participants will be invited to share their related research or curatorial experience to facilitate mutual learning and skills exchange.

The ECRN can provide a limited number of travel bursaries for Network members to attend this event. The Network can cover standard class travel within the UK. Please indicate on the Eventbrite sign-up form whether you would like to receive a bursary and Chloe and Roz (the Network’s Co-convenors) will be in touch.

About the speakers

  • Abi Shapiro is Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield with specialist research interests in post-war artistic practices and their displays as well as in critical histories of modern and contemporary British art collections. She has worked on curatorial projects including: Kim Lim: Space, Rhythm & Light (2023); Hannah Starkey: In Real Life (2022); The Art of the Potter: Sculpture and Ceramics from 1930 to Today (2023); and Sheila Hicks: Off Grid (2022). She was previously Research Curator, British Art 1945–1975 at Sheffield Museums, and has worked as a lecturer at the University of York, City & Guilds of London Art School and McGill University. She has a forthcoming chapter in the book Lifework: Autobiography, Labour, and Life Writing in Contemporary Art Since 1960 that will be published by Manchester University Press in summer 2024. 

  • Jonathan Vernon is an art historian specialising in modernism, sculpture and post-war politics. His PhD thesis (Courtauld Institute of Art, 2019) studied how Brâncuşi’s work was written into American, Western European and Romanian art histories and reinterpreted by sculptors after the artist’s death in 1957. In 2020–21 Jonathan was a Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has also served as an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute (2018–19, 2022–23) and was Ridinghouse Contributing Editor at Burlington Magazine (2014–17).