Professor Neil Cummings

Biography

Neil has evolved a multidisciplinary art practice that often requires an intense period of research within the specific contexts in which art is produced, distributed and encounters its audiences. Principally, this has meant working directly with museums, galleries, archives, auction houses and art schools.

Neil often works collaboratively with other artists, curators, academics and enthusiasts to create artworks, exhibitions and events from existing collections or contexts. Each artwork or event finds an appropriate form, and these are as varied as creating exhibitions such as Enthusiasm at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, curating film programmes such as Social Cinema in temporary public London locations, imagined possible futures for art and it's institutions with Museum Futures; Distributed, produced books including The Value of Things or convening participatory events such as Transacting at Chelsea College of Arts.

While interested in the political economy of creativity and how art is instituted, Neil is currently learning to live with less and experimenting with how to consume fewer resources. As part of these processes he's making some of the things he might need or want, specifically he's trying to be more conscious of what makes art and life joyful, but not at the expense of others.