Joanna Drew CBE (1929–2003) was an English art gallery director and arts administrator. [1] She worked for the Arts Council for nearly four decades, and was director of the Hayward Gallery from 1987 until 1992. She was once described as "unquestionably the most important individual in the British art scene". [2]
Joanna Drew was born in India, the daughter of Brigadier Francis Greville Drew, later military governor of Eritrea, and the artist Sannie Drew. She was educated at Edinburgh Ladies' College [3] and Dartington Hall before studying a course in the history and practice of art taught jointly by the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. [2]
Drew joined the Arts Council in 1952 as an exhibition organizer. She helped organize Fernando Gamboa's 1953 exhibition of Mexican art at the Tate Gallery, and went on to organize the 1960 Picasso exhibition (where takings were too large to count at the end of the day), the 1964 Miró exhibition and the 1968 Henry Moore exhibition at the Tate. [4] She became director of exhibitions at the Arts Council in 1975 and director of art in 1978. She was made director of the Hayward Gallery in 1987, and stayed in that role until she retired in 1992. [4]
Outside of her work at the Arts Council, Drew was a trustee of the Elephant Trust and the Henry Moore Foundation. [4]
Drew was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2002, and died in April the following year. [1]
Carey Young is a visual artist whose work is often inspired by law, politics and economics. The tools, language and architectures of these fields act as material for her videos, text works, performances and photographs, often developing from the professional cultures she explores. In her early video works, she donned attire appropriate to the business and legal worlds, enacting scenarios which examine and question each institution's power to shape society and individual identity. Since 2002, Young developed a large body of work addressing and critiquing law in relation to ideas of site, gender and performance. Young teaches at the Slade School of Fine Art in London where she is an Associate Professor in Fine Art.
Anya Gallaccio is a British artist, who creates site-specific, minimalist installations and often works with organic matter.
Sonia Dawn Boyce, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than 30 years in several art colleges across the UK.
Sir Alan Bowness CBE was a British art historian, art critic, and museum director. He was the director of the Tate Gallery between 1980 and 1988.
Anthony David Bernard Sylvester was a British art critic and curator. Although he received no formal education in the arts, during his long career he was influential in promoting modern artists, in particular Francis Bacon, Joan Miró, and Lucian Freud.
Henry Spencer Moore was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. Moore also produced many drawings, including a series depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.
Shirazeh Houshiary is an Iranian-born English sculptor, installation artist, and painter. She lives and works in London.
Rita Donagh is a British artist, known for her realistic paintings and painstaking draughtsmanship.
Bethan Huws is a Welsh multi-media artist whose work explores place, identity, and translation, often using architecture and text. Her work has been described as "delicate, unobtrusive interventions into architectural spaces".
Alison Mary Wilding OBE, RA is an English artist noted for her multimedia abstract sculptures. Wilding's work has been displayed in galleries internationally.
Keith Milow is a British artist. He grew up in Baldock, Hertfordshire, and lived in New York City (1980–2002) and Amsterdam (2002–2014), now lives in London. He is an abstract sculptor, painter and printmaker. His work has been characterised as architectural, monumental, procedural, enigmatic and poetical.
Andrew Sabin is a British sculptor. He studied at Chelsea College of Art (1979–1983) where he worked as a senior lecturer until 2006.
Gillian Mary Wise was a British artist devoted to the application of concepts of rationality and aesthetic order to abstract paintings and reliefs. Between 1972 and 1990 she was known as Gillian Wise Ciobotaru.
Kim Lim (1936–1997) was a Singaporean-British sculptor and printmaker of Chinese descent. She is most recognized for her abstract wooden and stone-carved sculptures that explore the relationship between art and nature, and works on paper that developed alongside her sculptural practice. Lim's attention to the minute details of curve, line and surface made her an exponent of minimalism.
Veronica Maudlyn Ryan is a Montserrat-born British sculptor. She moved to London with her parents when she was an infant and now lives between New York and Bristol. In December 2022, Ryan won the Turner Prize for her 'really poetic' work.
Leonard William Joseph McComb was a Scottish artist. He described his work as visual abstractions after nature. He was very interested in the detail in nature and declared that everything he drew or painted, whether a portrait head, flower, landscape, still life, or breaking sea wave, was, for him, a portrait.
Penelope Curtis is a British art historian and curator. Fom 2015 to 2020 she was the director of Lisbon's Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, and from 2010 to 2015 director of Tate Britain. She is the author of several monographs on sculpture and has written widely at the invitation of contemporary artists.
Katherine Gili is a British sculptor. Born in Oxford in 1948, is the daughter of Catalan publisher and translator Joan Gili and sister of the film-maker Jonathan Gili. She graduated from Bath Academy of Art in 1970 and then studied for two years at St Martin's School of Art. Gili subsequently taught at a number of art schools; most notably St Martin's and Norwich between 1972 and 1985.
Deanna Petherbridge is an artist, writer and curator. Petherbridge's practice is drawing-based, although she has also produced large-scale murals and designed for the theatre. Her publications in the area of art and architecture are concerned with contemporary as well as historical matters, and in latter years she has concentrated on writing about drawing. The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice was published June 2010 and curated exhibitions include The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy, 1997, Witches and Wicked Bodies, 2013. She celebrated a retrospective exhibition of her drawings at Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester accompanied by the monograph Deanna Petherbridge: Drawing and Dialogue, Circa Press, 2016.
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, editor and public speaker. In 2017 she was appointed the inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist endowed foundation that aims to continue the creative and investigative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson.