Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
In this event Gavin Butt will focus on three moments across the history of art education in Leeds when students came together to make work as a group. Eschewing the traditional focus on either outstanding teachers or exceptional individual student-artists, Gavin’s case studies will range from early 1970s performance art groups and late seventies art school bands to feminist collectives and Black art affiliates in the early 1980s.
The historical reflections will explore the place of group activity within the pedagogies and assessment processes of an earlier formation of the UK art school and ask how it might be understood as working the dialectical space between art school dreams and disillusionment characteristic of the post-1960s institution. And how might we learn from such histories in reimagining an art education of the present and for the future?
The INSIDE/OUT public programme of lectures invites speakers and leading thinkers whose breadth of work, practice, thought and collaboration we feel will inspire all our students and staff across the wide range of disciplines in the Leeds School of Arts.
Lectures will be available as digital films through the LARC website and open to all.
This event is running during LEEDS 2023's Season Three: Dreaming.
Gavin Butt is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He writes and makes creative research about visual art, popular music, queer culture and performance. His most recent research on the histories of art school education has resulted in the book No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (Duke 2022) and a related compilation LP The Art School Dance Goes On: Leeds Post-Punk 1977-1984 (Caroline True Records 2023).
He is also author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963 (Duke 2005) and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now (Repeater 2016) and of an issue of GLQ on “The Queer Commons” (2018). He is currently developing a new large-scale collaborative research project with Heike Roms which will explore the lessons to be learnt from the art education of the past across UK nations and regions.
