Photograph of Dr Francesca Berry
Dr Francesca Berry

Dr Francesca Berry is to participate in a round-table discussion on the topic of Feminist Domesticities in Art and Art History at Raven Row gallery, 56 Artillery Lane, London, E1 7LS, on Saturday 6 May 2017, 16:00 to 18:00.

Dr Berry is co-editor, with Dr Jo Applin (Courtauld Institute of Art) of the Oxford Art Journal’s vol. 40, no. 1, May 2017, Feminist Domesticities special issue, which will be launched at the Raven Row event. 

This event takes the publication of Feminist Domesticities as a starting point for discussion. The issue gathers an emerging corpus of feminist research and poses the crucial question of how we might encounter domesticity as concept, environment and object for art while resisting domesticity’s oppressive pre-eminence in the definition of femininity. The round-table provides the opportunity to consider some of these new directions in the context of the current Raven Row exhibition, 56 Artillery Lane, and to open avenues for discussion into belonging, precariousness, ageing and activism. A panel chaired by Tamar Garb, consisting of the editors, Jo Applin and Francesca Berry, and contributors, Teresa Kittler, Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin will begin the event, followed by discussion and a reception to celebrate the journal launch.

This is a free event. To register your attendance please visit the Raven Row website and follow the link to the Eventbrite page.

Feminist Domesticities originated as a conference, ‘House, Work, Artwork: Feminism and Art History’s New Domesticities’, held July 2015 at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham. It presents and consolidates a growing corpus of art-historical feminist scholarship on the domestic in relation to modernist, postmodernist and contemporary practice. The ten original research articles focus on the work of Louise Nevelson, Ida Applebroog, Carolee Schneeman, Carla Accardi, Lea Lublin, Ella Bergmann-Michel, Paulette Bernège, Sister Seven, Maxine Walker and women as photographers in the context of post-Web 2.0 user-led digital technology. Contributors share a common interest in the artistic and scholarly problems that arise when the feminist politics of artistic agency are positioned in critical and productive relation to the feminist politics of domesticity. Scholars tackles themes that include labour, temporality and domestic methodology; housing structures imagined for living differently; collective and individual resistance and radical domesticity; and fantastical entanglements of sexuality in domesticity, together with the various economies – formal, visual, political, psychic, that attach to each.