The contributors for MK Gallery’s upcoming Vanessa Bell Conference have been announced.
The gallery is thrilled to be joined by an exciting line up of experts and enthusiasts for this one-day conference, held in the 150-seat Sky Room auditorium.
Further details on the contributors can be found below:
Dr Rebecca Birrell is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of St Andrews and writer of This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Dr Darren Clarke is Head of Collections, Research and Exhibitions at the Charleston Trust. He has curated several exhibitions including Orlando at the present time (2018), and Post-Impressionist Living: The Omega Workshops (2019).
Rob Gifford is a cultural activist and co-curator of StonyWords, an annual community literary festival in Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes.
Dr Wendy Hitchmough is emeritus senior lecturer at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The Bloomsbury Look (Yale, 2020) and former curator at Charleston (2001-13).
Dr Hana Leaper is Reader in History of Art and Exhibition Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She completed her PhD Vanessa Bell and the Significance of Form in 2014.
Frances Spalding is an art historian, biographer and cultural historian. Projects include the biography Vanessa Bell (Bloomsbury, 2006) and an exhibition on Virginia Woolf (National Portrait Gallery, 2014).
Dr Claudia Tobin is a Senior Research Associate at the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College Cambridge, and curator of Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors (Garden Museum, 2024).
Additional contributors will be announced in due course.
The conference will be taking place on Friday 24 January, from 10am – 5pm, with an option to watch via live stream online. Tickets to the in-person conference will also include access to the Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour exhibition.
Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was a pioneering modernist painter and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of influential English artists, writers and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour at MK Gallery – her largest-ever solo show – provides an in-depth overview that includes drawings, paintings, ceramics and furniture.
Tickets to the Vanessa Bell Conference are available here.
Tickets to live stream the Vanessa Bell Conference are available here.
