PATRONS
Griselda Pollock is the Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds. For 40 years she has dedicated herself to teaching, and researching and expanding the ways we study, and interpret the art of the past and the present as a way to understand our societies, world histories and ourselves. She challenges the isolation of art from society and history, and from other forms of visual culture, like cinema and the media. Above all, her many books make visible the women artists of all nations and ethnicities.
“All the big issues: class, race, gender, sexuality, power, fantasy, the body, the city, utopias, passion, fear, story-telling, imagining other worlds, encounters with other times, places, cultures, history, memory, horror, trauma: all these are what you learn about when you study art’s many histories. It is the subject if you want to learn to look, to learn to see and to learn to understand the world, past and present, here and there.”
Marcia Pointon began teaching in the late 1960s, working with adult students first through the Workers’ Educational Association and then the Open University. At the University of Sussex from 1975, and Manchester from 1992, she promoted admission of students from unprivileged backgrounds to art history courses. In 1980 she published the first edition of History of Art: A Student’s Handbook (5th edition 2014), an introduction to undergraduate study in the discipline She is a trustee of the Art Fund which offers a student national art pass.
“Art History is a phenomenal training for the mind, requiring skills in analysis, the evaluation of different forms of evidence, an understanding of the materials of the made-world, and a nuanced approach to history; graduates in Art History enter a wide range of professions in the public and private sectors as well as in the culture industries.”