Past Events

Roundtable: Re-Imagining British Art History & Futures

DRN Events – Jessie McLaughlin, Lu Zhang, Zarina Muhammad

  • 26 October 2021
  • 5:30 – 6:30 pm

This is an event for DRN members only. You can find out more about the network here.

This event builds on the ideas at the core of the cancelled DRN event 'Dreaming Utopia: The Possibilities of Imagining British Art History Otherwise'. The roundtable will feature three speakers who will discuss how their work is contributing to changing how British art history is studied and (re)presented, both in writing and in exhibitions. This event will be a relaxed discussion about the current issues facing institutions that display British art and teach British art history, and what possible changes can be made to address them. We hope to discuss areas such as access, education, workplace practices, inclusion, COVID-19, and privatisation, and what we – as the next generation of art historians – can do to improve British art studies.

About the speakers

  • Jessie with head between knees - awkwardly cut out on white background presumably on photoshop

    Jessie is a writer, curator and artist born in london. i work from a queer, brown (sometimes sad) perspective, foregrounding emotional experiences and proposing these as valid methods of research. currently i am doing a PhD with goldsmiths (university of london) and tate and funded by ARHC researching how to queer and decolonise the

    space of the art museum through working with young people and the learning and education curators who support them.

  • Lu Zhang in front of the sea - hair blowing

    Lu Zhang is a third-year PhD student studying art history in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is interested in public and private collections of Chinese art, the history of exhibiting Chinese art in Europe, and the repatriation and restitution of Chinese cultural relics. Her work-in-progress thesis observes the relationship between art, politics, and the discursive, and analyses a series of exhibitions of Chinese art held at the Royal Academy of Arts, the National Museum of China, and the Guggenheim in New York. Lu is from a broad arts background with an MA in History and Business of Art Collecting from Institut d'études supérieures des arts Paris (2017, France), an MA in Global Media and Post-national Communication from SOAS (2011, UK), and a BA in Journalism from Nanchang University (2010, China). Lu is also an art consultant and curator at Artiste Culture. Before that, she spent several years working in the international education industry in China.

  • Head shot of Zarina Muhammad in black and white

    The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which they publish reviews and essays about art, video games and food. You can find them at thewhitepube.com or on Twitter and Instagram at @thewhitepube.