Writing

Leave a comment Posted on March 5, 2021May 14, 2021 by Harriet Atkinson Media, Writing

The 70th anniversary of the Festival of Britain

Festival of Britain South Bank Exhibition Guide written by Ian Cox

In 2021 various organisations will mark the 70th anniversary of the Festival of Britain (held from May to September 1951) with talks, lectures and symposia. Following on from her previous research into the Festival, Harriet has been invited to contribute in several ways.

To mark the founding of the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in 1951, the museum is running a project called 51-voices. Harriet was invited to focus on an item from the Festival in MERL’s large collection of objects and ephemera and wrote this piece about the Festival’s South Bank Exhibition Guide. She was interviewed by Bill Buckley on BBC Radio Berkshire about the Festival Guide on 19th March 2021.

Harriet’s invited feature about the refugees who designed the Festival of Britain was in the May 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine. She was interviewed on the same theme for an episode of History Extra podcast available here.

Harriet was a guest on Ayesha Hazarika and Luke Jones’s show with Times Radio Breakfast on Monday 3rd May 2021 at 54 minutes.

Harriet gave a free public talk about refugee contributions to the Festival of Britain as part of the programme of the Insiders/ Outsiders Festival (co-organised for the Festival’s 70th anniversary with the Southbank Centre and Twentieth Century Society) on 5th May 2021 at 6pm. The talk was recorded and is available here.

HARRIET’S PREVIOUS WORK ON THE FESTIVAL

Harriet’s published work on the Festival includes her book The Festival of Britain: a land and its people (I.B. Tauris, 2012), an invited chapter ‘”The first modern townscape?” The Festival of Britain, townscape and the Picturesque’ in Pendlebury, Erten and Larkham (eds.) Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction (Routledge, 2015), an invited catalogue essay for the Jewish Museum’s Designs on Britain: Great British design by Great Jewish designers (Jewish Museum London, 2017), an invited chapter on ‘Artists and the Festival of Britain’ for Monica Bohm-Duchen (ed) Insiders/ Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture (Lund Humphries, 2019), an essay ‘A “New Picturesque”? The Aesthetics of British Reconstruction after World War Two‘ for Edinburgh Architecture Research (2008) and an invited essay on the Festival for Findling & Pelle’s Encyclopedia of world’s fairs and expositions (McFarland, 2008). She completed her PhD on the design of the Festival of Britain with the Royal College of Art/ V&A History of Design programme in 2006, supervised by Professor Jeremy Aynsley and Professor David Crowley and examined by Professor Barry Curtis (UAL) and Professor David Matless (Nottingham).

Harriet led various activities to mark the Festival’s 60th anniversary, acting as consultant to Southbank Centre, writing text for ‘The Museum of 1951’ exhibition, which culminated in a permanent display and arranging a major event at Royal Festival Hall to mark the end of the 60th anniversary programming, in September 2011. She was interviewed for a Radio 3 Sunday Feature presented by Sir John Tusa, ‘Don’t Make Fun of the Festival’, wrote a piece about archaeology in the Festival for British Archaeology November/ December 2011 and a piece about Festival style ‘All the World is Coming to London’ for Mid Century Magazine. Harriet has also written obituaries of Festival designers and administrators including Paul Wright for The Independent.

Leave a comment Posted on December 16, 2020April 11, 2021 by Harriet Atkinson Writing

Harriet publishes article in Journal of Design History

Portrait of Misha Black taken in 1951 (photograph by Clifford Hatts and reproduced courtesy of the Hatts family)

In December 2020 Harriet’s article entitled ‘“Lines of Becoming”: Misha Black and Entanglements Through Exhibition Design’ was published in the Journal of Design History. This explores the networks that exhibition designer Misha Black (1910-1977) created and sustained across five decades and many continents, engagements that impacted on his changing personal and professional identities. Through interrogating Misha Black’s work, the article focuses on exhibitions as sites of personal and professional ‘entanglement’ across time and space, in a single career. It links exhibitions, which are often considered in isolation in historical accounts. In Black’s case, through successive commissions he developed ideas about exhibitions as communications or propaganda, as well as modelling formations in professional design practice. Examples that the article focuses on are The Seville Exhibition, 1929-30; MARS Group Exhibition, 1938; Glasgow Empire Exhibition, 1938; New York World’s Fair, 1939-40; Ministry of Information exhibitions during World War Two and the Festival of Britain, 1951. The article is free and open access thanks to the RCUK Open Access Publication Fund.

Leave a comment Posted on October 17, 2020March 3, 2021 by Harriet Atkinson Talks, Writing

Harriet presents her work at the ICDHS conference in October 2020

On Saturday 17th October, Harriet gave a paper entitled ‘Exhibitions as Political “Demonstrations”: Artists International Association’s For Liberty Exhibition, London 1943′ at the ICDHS12 conference. In the paper she explored the idea of exhibitions having the capacity to act as political ‘demonstrations’ – a term used by the AIA to describe their exhibitions – by considering For Liberty’s site, installation, content, integration of graphics, space, text and image.

The 2020 ICDHS conference was organised by the International Committee for Design History and Design Studies and convened by Dr Fedja Vukić (Institute for the Research of the Avant-garde, Zagreb), with keynotes from design theorist Matko Meštrović and Professor Yuko Kikuchi icdhs12.org. Harriet spoke in a strand entitled ‘Politics and Design: Past, Present, Future’ co-chaired by Barbara Predan (Academy of Fine Arts, University of Ljubljana) and Tevfik Balcıoğlu (ARUCAD University, Northern Cyprus). Her paper is published in the conference proceedings entitled Lessons to Learn? Past Design Experiences and Contemporary Design Practices edited by Fedja Vukić and Iva Kostešić (ISBN 978-953-7703-67-7).

Leave a comment Posted on April 30, 2020December 16, 2020 by Harriet Atkinson Writing

Harriet’s new book to be published by Manchester University Press

Harriet is delighted that Manchester University Press (MUP) will publish her new book entitled Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953. The book, which is a major focus of her AHRC project, will be published in MUP’s prestigious Studies in Design and Material Culture series. It is the first history of documentary exhibitions mounted in Britain from the 1930s to the 1950s to communicate messages of propaganda and political resistance. It will be 80,000 words long and highly illustrated.

The MUP series’ general editors are Christopher Breward and James Ryan. The series’ founding editor was Paul Greenhalgh, whose landmark thematic history of major international exhibitions Ephemeral Vistas: History of the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, was published by MUP in 1990.

London Pride exhibition at Charing Cross underground station, from Display magazine, March 1941.

The Materialisation of Persuasion