Great exhibitions: from the 18th century to the future
Ten-week art history and theory course
Tuesday 11 October - Wednesday 14 December 2016
The Life Room, Royal Academy Schools
The full 10-week course has now sold out. Tickets are still available for the second five-week slot at £290 for five weeks. Includes light refreshments and a drinks reception at the end of week 10.
Terms and conditions
Led by Andrea Tarsia, the Royal Academy’s Head of Exhibitions, this course provides a unique opportunity to learn about the history of exhibitions, exhibition-making and how art is viewed. Guest speakers including Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery, and Gregor Muir, director of the ICA, will explore landmark exhibitions which have changed the way we see, display and understand art.
Drawing on historical and contemporary cases, including from the Royal Academy, as well as practical experience from world-class commercial, private and public galleries, Andrea Tarsia is joined by guest speakers and cultural leaders from across the art world. They examine what makes a great exhibition, the way it can change and define artists and movements and inform how we look at and understand art.
Exhibitions today are the most high profile way of viewing and engaging in art and culture, and have come to be presented in formats we know and expect. Yet where did exhibitions come from? How did exhibitions evolve? Why is art displayed the way it is? This course will explore how the culture of exhibiting has changed over time, through some of the great exhibitions that have helped shape and define the arts and cultural world around them.
Location and display has affected the relationship between art and its public throughout history. Yet exhibitions – intended as a public display and staged encounter between art and its audience – are a relatively recent phenomenon. Emerging alongside the museum, from the 17th and 18th centuries, over time artists increasingly took control of how their work was presented and viewed. As an artist-led organisation, the Royal Academy played a central role in this history, staging an annual exhibition of contemporary art which has survived continuously for nearly 250 years, known today as the Summer Exhibition.
This course will explore how and where we view art through some of the key events, great exhibitions and artistic moments that have defined art history. It will consider exhibitions both within a historic trajectory, whilst also exploring the context and cultural milieu – the people, activities, movements and debates – that shaped them.
The course will consider the evolving formats and structures of the exhibition, from the early Salons to the contemporary survey, from the Great Exhibitions of the 19th century to large scale manifestations like biennials and fairs. It will explore the different spaces that exhibitions have inhabited, from those of the institution to alternatives across the city or even dispersed in landscape.
Critically, this course will also reveal how the changing nature of artistic practice has driven changes to the presentation of art, contributing to the rise of the ‘white cube’. It will consider how artists have made traditions of display a focus of their own practice, by creating imaginary museums, intervening in the space of the museum or producing installations that refer back to the early cabinets of curiosities. Not least, the course will explore the changing roles of those behind the scenes, from artists themselves to the rise of the curator in the post war era.
Sessions are taught by leading curators, critics and art historians, and will present key exhibitions that captured, reviewed or precipitated change, defining artistic tendencies and addressing conventions of their display. While the course will consider developments in the 18th and 19th centuries it will primarily address the modern and contemporary period, which more than any other has embraced and re-imagined the exhibition as medium, enabling a view of exhibitions of the future.
Wednesday 12 October - Wednesday 9 November (Weeks 1 - 5) -to the mid-20th century (sold out)
Wednesday 16 November - Wednesday 14 December (Weeks 6 - 10) -the 20th century and beyond
The full ten-week course has now sold out. Tickets are still available for the second block of five weeks, 16 November - 14 December 2017.
About the course
Led by Andrea Tarsia, the Royal Academy’s Head of Exhibitions, this course provides a unique opportunity to learn about the history of exhibitions, exhibition-making and how art is viewed from leading curators and art world experts. The course explores landmark exhibitions which have changed the way we see, display and understand art. Drawing on historical and contemporary cases, including from the Royal Academy, as well as practical experience from world-class commercial, private and public galleries, Andrea Tarsia is joined by guest speakers and cultural leaders from across the art world. They examine what makes a great exhibition, the way it can change and define artists and movements and inform how we look at and understand art.
Wednesday 12 October - Wednesday 9 November (Weeks 1 - 5) -to the mid 20th century
Wednesday 16 November - Wednesday 14 December (Weeks 6 - 10) -the 20th century and beyond
This course takes place for 10 weeks on consecutive Wednesday evenings from 6.00pm - 8.00pm, from 12 October - 14 December 2016. The full 10-week course has now sold out. Tickets are still available for the second block of five weeks,16 November - 14 December 2017
This course is suitable for all levels of people with a willingness to be open minded and enjoy a challenging mix of art-historical and practical knowledge and learning.
This course will be delivered in part through lectures but will also include an opportunity for questions and discussion from participants.
This course is designed to enable an historical overview for those new to the field but is relevant for those with prior art world experience keen to learn from experts in the field.
Price for five weeks: £290
Price for 10 weeks: £540
Registration from 5.30pm
6.00pm - 8.00pm per session
This course provides:
• A rich combination of lectures, discussion and the opportunity for expert-led answers from a range of art world speakers
• An exploration of the history of exhibitions and how art is viewed
• Skills and knowledge relevant to those with art historical, curatorial and arts management interests.
• The opportunity to learn from art world experts and discuss the process of making of world class exhibitions
• The opportunity to socialise and network with peers in a friendly environment
• Access to the Royal Academy’s historic Life Room at the heart of the RA schools
• A certificate of participation upon course completion
• Light refreshments at the beginning of each session
• A drinks reception at the end of weeks 5 and 10
Who can take this course?
This course is for you if:
• You have a general interested in art history and would like a novel way to understand cultural and historical change
• You are interested in core knowledge about exhibition history and making from both a historical and practical perspective
• You have a personal or professional interested in how art can be presented, displayed and viewed by different audiences
• You currently work, or aspire to work, in the arts and cultural settings and want to understand the exhibition making-process and be exposed to art world professionals and leading curators.
Minimum age 18
Andrea Tarsia
Andrea Tarsia is Head of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Art, overseeing the delivery and development of the Academy’s world-renowned exhibitions programme. He trained in Art History and Film before specialising in post war and contemporary art, and has previously worked for the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitechapel Gallery among others. He has curated many international exhibitions of contemporary art, including Live In Your Head: Conceptual and Experimental Practices in Britain 1965-75; Early One Morning: New British Sculpture; A Short History of Performance, Parts I-IV; Gerhard Richter – Atlas and Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers. He has also contributed to numerous publications, including Isa Genzken, Whitechapel Gallery; Claire Barclay, Camden Arts Centre and 20th Century British Sculpture, Henry Moore Foundation. While at the Whitechapel he helped devise and taught on an MA Course in Curating, in conjunction with London Metropolitan University, and has been guest lecturer at several universities and art colleges across the UK.
Guest Speakers
Andrea is joined by leading guests from across the art world in this exciting and unique course offered at the Royal Academy for the first time. Speakers include:
Prof. Mark Hallett
Mark is Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues on aspects of British painting and printmaking. His publications include Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (Yale University Press, 2014), and he is the co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition, The Great Spectacle: the Royal Academy and its Summer Exhibitions, 1769-2018, to be held at the Academy in 2018.
Professor Fae Brauer
Fae Brauer is a writer and lecturer with a special interest in nineteenth and twentieth century French art and cultural politics. She is Professor of Art and Visual Culture at the University of East London Centre for Cultural Studies Research and Honorary Professor in Art History and Cultural Theory at The University of New South Wales National Institute of Experimental Arts. The focus of her research is cultural politics, particularly art and cultural institutions, as well as the human and animal body and intersections forged between modern art, evolution, occulture, sexualities, science and medicine. She is the author of several publications, including Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre.
Professor John Milner
John is an art historian, tutor, painter, writer and exhibition organiser and a specialist in 20th-century art in Russia. He is Honorary Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he has run a prolifically active Masters course on Contacts and Contexts in Russian Art, 1905-45. He has curated several exhibitions on El Lissitzy, Russian Graphic art, Rodchenko’s photographs and the Costakis Collection of Russian Art. John has published regularly on Russian art and spoken at international conferences and debates, mostly through the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre, of which he was co-founder.
Sarah Lea
Curator, Royal Academy of Arts
Iwona Blazwick
Iwona Blazwick has been the Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London since 2001 and is a curator, critic and lecturer. She was formerly at Tate Modern and London’s ICA as well as working as an independent curator in Europe and Japan. Blazwick is the series editor of Whitechapel Gallery/MIT's Documents of Contemporary Art. She has written monographs and articles on many contemporary artists and published extensively on themes and movements in modern and contemporary art, exhibition histories and art institutions.
Kate Goodwin
Kate is Head of Architecture and Drue Heinz Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, overseeing a programme of events and exhibitions which stimulates a debate about architecture and its intersection with the arts. She curated numerous projects, including the acclaimed exhibition Sensing Spaces: Architecture Reimagined, (January- April 2014) at the Royal Academy and is curator of New British Inventors: Inside Heatherwick Studio, currently touring East Asia for the British Council. She was awarded a RIBA Honorary Fellowship in 2016 in recognition of her contribution to the profession.
Gregor Muir
Gregor Muir is the Executive Director of the ICA, where he has overseen a programme featuring exhibitions by Tauba Auerbach, Zhang Enli, Richard Hamilton, Bruce Nauman and Juergen Teller as well as off-site exhibitions in Birmingham, London and Hong Kong. Between 2004–2011, Gregor was the Director of Hauser & Wirth, London, organising exhibitions in London, Zurich and New York with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Francis Picabia and Wilhelm Sasnal. Gregor worked as the Kramlich Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate where he co-curated the first moving-image show Time Zones at Tate Modern, and In-a-Gaddada-Vida with Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain, both in 2004. He also worked on contemporary art acquisitions for Tate Collections, and curated several displays of contemporary art. In 1997, Gregor founded the Lux Gallery in Hoxton Square, Shoreditch, which featured exhibitions by Kutlug Ataman, Carsten Höller and Jane & Louise Wilson. In the same year, he co-curated Assuming Positions at the ICA, which included works by Tobias Rehberger and Piotr Uklanski, as well as curating pioneering programmes of film and video art. In 1994 he curated the exhibition Liar, featuring works by Cerith Wyn Evans and Jake & Dinos Chapman, and in 1993 he worked on the group show Lucky Kunst, featuring works by Gary Hume and Sam Taylor-Wood, which would later inspire a book of the same name documenting the '90s London art scene.
About the Space
The Life Room
Set in the Academy’s historic Life Room, nestled deep in the heart of the RA Schools, this unique and significant space was designed in the 1860s when the galleries and schools were first constructed, purpose built to accommodate the study of the human form in art.
The semi-circular seating arrangement is based on an ancient design and can trace its British history back to the 1730s and Hogarth’s Academy in St Martin’s Lane. The directional light is also of ancient design and is used (then as now) to provide directional light to aid the delineation of the figure’s musculature – significantly enhance the use and study of colour and light in art.
Our courses and classes programme
Our programme of short courses and classes offers the opportunity to explore a range of subjects, led by expert tutors and practising artists.