Deborah Cherry
Title
Professor of Art History & Theory
College
Central Saint Martins
Email address
Tags
Researcher Research
Biography
Deborah Cherry is an art historian and curator. Following doctoral research at University College London, she wrote extensively on nineteenth-century art with two pioneering studies of 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) and she collaborated on studies of women in early twentieth-century Vorticism. She has investigated the genesis and use of the term Pre-Raphaelitism, and the exchanges between women’s activities as artists, as models and fashion trendsetters. She has written extensively on contemporary art, notably by Maud Sulter, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzales Torres, Zarina Bhimji, Chila Kumari Burman and on the sensory engagements of installation art.She has written on monuments and their afterlives in central London and in South Asia. Exhibitions curated (and co-curated) include Treatise on the Sublime (1990), The Edwardian Era (1987), and Maud Sulter: Passion (2015-16). She has taught at the universities of Manchester, Sussex, and Amsterdam, at the Sandberg Akademie and on De Appel curatorial programme and is currently Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art and the University of Amsterdam. She was the editor of Art History, 2003-8. She is currently co-editing a book on Tracey Emin.
At present I am intrigued by the afterlives of things: how works of art and monuments change over time and how these altered states in an artwork’s social life can prompt new ways of understanding and interpretation. Changes may occur for a variety of reasons, from the fragility of materials to major social and political transformations. These concerns coincide with long-standing interests in diaspora and migration in a recent essay, ‘Suitcase Aesthetics: The Making of Memory in Diaspora Art in Britain in the Later 1980s, Art History, 40, September 2017. This essay also investigates mnemonic histories as I return to look again at works of art first seen several decades ago. My interests in afterlives have promoted The Afterlives of Monuments, a collection of essays focused on South Asia, and explorations of haunting in contemporary art and the cityscapes of the present.
Research Outputs
Article
- Cherry D. Suitcase Aesthetics: The Making of Memory in Diaspora Art in Britain in the Later 1980s (2017)
- Cherry D. The Ghost Begins By Coming Back: Revenants and Returns in Maud Sulter's Photomontages (2015)
- Cherry D. Spatial conversations: on the candy spills of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Dialogis Espaciais: os Derramamentos de caramelos de Felix Gonzalez Torres (2007)
- Cherry D. Statues in the Square: Hauntings at the Heart of Empire (2006)
- Cherry D. Going Places: Women Artists in Central London in the 1850s and 1860s (2003)
- Cherry D. The Art of the Senses and the Making of a Diasporan Aesthetics: Zarina Bhimji's 'She Loved to Breathe–Pure Silence', 1987-2002 (2003)
- Cherry D, Walker L. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: Image, Identity and Space in the Modernization of Nineteenth-century Medicine (2002)
- Cherry D. Troubling Presence: body, sound and space in installation art of the mid-1990s (2000)
Book
- Cherry D, Kokoli A. Tracey Emin: Art into Life (2020)
- Cherry D. Maud Sulter: Passion (2015)
- Cherry D. The Afterlives of Monuments (2014)
- Cherry D. About Mieke Bal (2008)
- Cherry D, Cullen F. Spectacle and Display (2008)
- Cherry D, Cullen F. Location (2007)
- Cherry D. About Stephen Bann (2006)
- Cherry D, Scott K. Between Luxury and the Everyday: Decorative Arts in Eighteenth-Century France (2005)
- Cherry D, Helland J. Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (2005)
- Cherry D. Art: History: Visual: Culture (2005)
- Cherry D. Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850-1900 (2001)
Book Section
- Cherry D. The Urgency of Now (2019)
- Cherry D. The Ghost Begins by Coming Back. Revenants And Returns In Maud Sulter’s Photomontages (2015)
- Cherry D. Poetry--in Motion (2015)
- Cherry D. Altered States: the social biographies of works of art. She Loved to Breathe - Pure Silence (1987-2012) by Zarina Bhimji (2014)
- Cherry D. With her Fingers on the Political Pulse: The Transnational Curating of Maud Sulter (2013)
- Cherry D. Image-making with Jeanne Duval in mind: photoworks by Maud Sulter, 1989−2002 (2013)
- Cherry D. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (1829–1862) (2012)
- Cherry D. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, 1829-61 (2012)
- Cherry D. In a word, Pre-Raphaelite, Pre-Raphaelites, Pre-Raphaelitism (2009)
- Cherry D. A Sea of Senses (2007)
- Cherry D. Dreaming Awake: Images of Women in Pre-Raphaelite Art (2004)
- Cherry D. Earth into the World, Land into Landscape: The “Worlding” of Algeria in Nineteenth-Century British Feminism (2002)
- Cherry D. On the Move: My Bed, 1998-99 (2002)
Conference, Symposium or Workshop item
- Cherry D. The Contradictions of the (Para)National (2015)
- Cherry D. The afterlives of monuments (2010)
- Cherry D. Wendelien van Oldenborgh | Lecture/Audience/Camera (2009)
- Cherry D, Tatchell N. TrAIN Conversation: Sebastian Lopez (2008)
Show/Exhibition
- Cherry D, Dickson M. Maud Sulter: Passion (2016)
- Cherry D. Maud Sulter: Passion (2015)