Deborah Cherry

Biography

Deborah Cherry is an art historian and curator. Following doctoral research at University College London, funded by a Boswell Scholarship from the University of Edinburgh, she wrote two pioneering monographs on the lives and artistic practice of women artists. Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1994) and Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain, 1850-1900 (2000) She has collaborated on several studies of women in early twentieth-century Vorticism. She has written extensively on contemporary art, notably by Maud Sulter, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzales Torres, Zarina Bhimji, and Chila Kumari Singh Burman.Issues of diaspora and migration are considered in ‘Suitcase Aesthetics: The Making of Memory in Diaspora Art in Britain in the Later 1980s” and “Hello Girls, Hiya Sisters”, commissioned for the upcoming Tate monograph on Chila Burman (2024).
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A British Academy and Nehru Centre funded conference on the Monuments of South Asia led to a collection of essays on The Afterlives of Monuments in central London and in South Asia (2014), while prompting a fascination with afterlives and the social lives of art, considering works of art and their material condition change over time and the ways in which these altered states can support new understandings and interpretation.

Exhibitions curated (and co-curated) include Treatise on the Sublime (1990), The Edwardian Era (1987), Maud Sulter: Passion (2015-16, funded by Arts Council England and Creative Scotland). Maud Sulter : Memory and Identity (Glasgow, 2022). She is currently co-curating an archival display for the exhibition Avant-garde and Liberation at Mumok, Vienna (2024).

She has taught at the universities of Manchester, Sussex, CalState, and Amsterdam, at the Sandberg Akademie and on De Appel curatorial programme. Returning to the UK she became Associate Dean of Research at LCC. She is currently Professor Emerita of Art History and Theory at Central St Martins. She was the editor of Art History (2003-8) and an editorial collective member of Feminist Arts News. She has been a member of the Association of Art Historians, CAA, Women’s History Network, Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art, Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA). As one of the directors of TrAIN [the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation at the University of Arts London] she curated TrAIN conversations with leading international artists and curators. She was the editor of Art History,(2003-8). She chairs the Advisory Board to the Estate of Maud Sulter. She has been interviewed by Text zur Kunst, UAL Voices and the British Art Network newsletter. One of her Mary Quant dresses was acquired by the V&A for the Mary Quant exhibition, while other Quant clothes were gifted to Fashion Museum Bath.