The Art History and Architecture Collection is a vital resource for academic libraries, offering extensive insights into various themes such as art movements, single-artist studies, decolonising art, gender and masculinity, citizenship, architecture and design. This collection aims to broaden the scope of art history, addressing a diverse range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
The collection encompasses theories and histories of materiality, exploring the intricate relationship between making and thinking, fashion and culture, production and consumption, textiles and industry.
| Key series |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Design and Material Culture |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 17 |
| 2023/4 titles | 28 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 74 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Singleartist studies |
| Subcultures |
| Design |
| Architecture |
| Citizenship |
| Surrealism |
| Art movements |
| Decolonising art |
| Queer art |
| Gender – masculinity |
| Modernism |
| Postmodernism |
| Thema subject categories |
| Architecture |
| Avant-garde |
| Ceramics, mosaics and glass: artworks |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History of art |
| Material culture |
| Performance art |
| Theory of art |
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Art history and architecture collection
Hatty Nestor’s essay seeks to enact an intervention in writing after the death of artist Ana Mendieta. By exploring her affective afterlife in feminist re-enactment and political protests, this article argues for the potentialities of activism to reach across space and time.
Part VI comprises a series of four dialogues with contemporary art and writing practitioners whose work represents a critical intervention in thinking about gesture, politics, and embodiment – across art, writing, and theory – and the various entanglements found therein. This dialogue on gesture takes the form of an epistolary exchange between the poets Nisha Ramayya and Nat Raha.
Part of a series of four dialogues with contemporary art and writing practitioners whose work represents a critical intervention in thinking about gesture, politics, and embodiment – across art, writing, and theory – and the various entanglements found therein. This collaborative dialogue on gesture as writing is written by Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant.
Gestures: A body of work is a cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to gesture that inhabits the spaces between visual art, literature, and performance. Combining creative and critical modes, it is the first comprehensive and collective feminist investigation of gesture – as represented, performed, and mobilised in art, writing, and multiple interdisciplinary entanglements. Articles, essays, and dialogues consider and perform how gesture/s and feminism/s have animated one another in feminist and interdisciplinary artistic practice, attending to gestural encounters in art, literature, and life. Offering interdisciplinary readings of artists and writers’ work from the 1960s onwards, contributors explore well-known but complex figures such as Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman, alongside those less recognised by canonical feminist art histories, including artist-writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. Also included are experiments in art writing and autotheory that explore and perform the ways the body acts through, acts up, and is acted upon by the lived experience of gestures, be it the ‘cut’ of khatna in practices of female genital cutting or the ‘scratch’ incurred by the skin disease eczema. While gestures can sometimes fail or falter, this book maintains that they hold potential for imagining new worlds beyond heterosexist, patriarchal, ableist, racist, and imperialist spaces of biopolitical control. Together, these contributions offer a fresh intervention into the conventions of critical writing. Conceived as a body of parts organised by gesture, this collection offers an essential rethinking of what feminist practice, theory, and history can say and do.
Giulia Damiani considers gesture through the lens of inheritance and translation, focusing on trans-generational, trans-national relations built through the author’s embodied process of re-enactment within the archive of the feminist collective of artists, Le Nemesiache, based in Naples, Italy, in the 1970s and 1980s.
In this article, Joey Frances considers the infra-linguistic registers at work in Bhanu Kapil's multigenre text, Ban en Banlieue (2015). Frances reads Kapil's multigenre text as ‘performance-gesture’: an offering of failure and exhaustion, which responds to conditions of sexualised and racialised violence without reproducing the oppressive structures of representation that perpetuate those conditions. As such, gesture is reimagined as an intersubjective intervention of anti-racist solidarities.
Many iconic early modern fashions did not rely on the most sumptuous materials, but instead utilised innovative fabrics and techniques that imitated the sensory effects of luxury materials. While many of these objects are missing or overlooked in collections, this chapter uses hands-on experimental reconstructions, made and tested following early modern sources, to suggest how fakes might have operated aesthetically and culturally, and explores how mimetic materials enabled individuals who were economically or legally unable to wear the finest furs, fabrics, metals and jewels to dress in early modern fashions. Using the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database of 445 inventories that record the belongings of members of the artisan classes in Siena, Florence and Venice between 1550 and 1650, as well as sources from other European cities, it locates some of these materials among the possessions of artisans. But it also challenges the assumption that imitations were simply inferior copies for the non-elite. Imitations led to new craft specialisations, diversified the market and cleverly skirted legal restrictions, which enabled people across the social spectrum to participate in fashion. The chapter also explores how mimetic fashions might have been thought about by the early modern men and women who wore them. In doing so, it reveals how the often overlooked category of imitations disrupted a culture of clothing that had relied on a hierarchy of materials to display social status, and led to creative ways of making and dressing.
Chapter 2 closely examines the birth and development of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), which grew from a municipal college into a university. The expansion began in the mid-1950s and was well in advance of the New Universities programme, its only precedent being the concurrent expansion of Imperial College London. Its novel status meant that its buildings were at the forefront of the development of types in the post-war expansion of the Higher Education sector – the first lecture-room building, one of the earliest halls of residence and new laboratories used novel construction methods that were themselves used as research projects. There was significant political interplay in the creation of the institution and its novation from local government control to become a chartered university. Manchester’s most prominent architects of the period worked collaboratively in the development of a modern campus carved from early industrial remnants huddled around an urban river course. The architects engaged with the University Grants Committee in the development of the campus and these early examples of post-war higher education buildings were used as yardsticks for those that followed. As UMIST was consolidated the masterplan for the whole University precinct was commissioned and effectively formed the partnership of Wilson Womersley. Their Education Precinct Plan, published in 1967, established the framework for university development for the rest of the century. The chapter captures these local, regional and national networks and shows how they coalesced in the production of a linear cityscape 1½ miles long.
Part of a series of four dialogues with contemporary art and writing practitioners whose work represents a critical intervention in thinking about gesture, politics, and embodiment – across art, writing, and theory – and the various entanglements found therein. This dialogue on gesture takes the form of an experimental epistolary exchange between the artist Jade Montserrat and artist-theorist Erin Manning.