Art History
Talks & Events
Northlight Arts Centre and Leeds Art History Group bring you the North's best voices in historical art. Our Art History Talks are your opportunity to join professors, art historians, artists and academics for two hours of engaging talks and lectures with discussions and Q&A.
TICKETS COST £10 for each evening
Doors open 6.30pm to buy refreshments. Talk starts at 7pm.
Licensed Bar serving beers and wines.
Coffee and soft refreshments also available.
Free visitors’ car park
Well serviced bus routes to and from Harrogate and Leeds
Wheelchair access
Autumn programme
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
A talk by Simon Marginson
23RD SEPT
During his lifetime, Diego Rivera was the most famous artist in Mexico and the most renowned Mexican artist in the world. Today, his wife, Frida Kahlo, not only holds that honour but has surpassed it. She is the world’s most famous and expensive female artist.
This talk offers an introduction to their work, taking in Diego’s public murals and Kahlo’s personal canvases, setting their work against a backdrop of political upheavals and private suffering.
Jan Van Eyck
A talk by Chris Wood
7TH OCTOBER
Jan Van Eyck and the Tech Bro’s Before and after oil painting.
How the world changed - A story of invention, espionage, and the inevitable journey towards realism and old master technique.
Beatriz Gonzalez
A talk by Matthew Merrick
21ST OCTOBER
A Discussion on the Work of the Columbian Artist.
The Absent Presence:
Painting and Memory
A talk by Adam Stone
4TH NOVEMBER
“We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left.”
— Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.
This presentation explores the ways memory and forgetting have shaped and inspired painting across time and culture. Drawing on examples from both Western and non-Western traditions, from historical practice to the present day, it examines how different dimensions of memory - perceptual, gestural, material, procedural, collective - are woven into how paintings are understood and made.
The Anglo-Saxons and the
Silk Roads
A talk by Professor Joyce Hill
18TH NOVEMBER
Explore how the Anglo-Saxons benefitted from ideas and objects travelling along the Silk Roads - garnets from India and Sri Lanka, artistic styles from Byzantium, flagons from Syria, even Chinese silk - and see how the East influenced the farthest West.
A Continuous Circulation:
Maurice de Sausmarez and Art Education in Mid-Century Leeds
A talk by Kerry Harker
9TH DECEMBER
Using original material from the archive of artist and educator Maurice de Sausmarez ( 1915 - 69 ) this illustrated talk offers fresh perspectives on the role of artists in Leeds in shaping radical new approaches to art education in Britain after the Second World War.
The research was undertaken by Dr Harker during her Bridget Riley Art Foundation Fellowship in the University of Leeds’ Cultural Collections, where de Sausmarez’s archive is preserved, for an exhibition she curated at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery earlier this year.