Art on the Streets, a new documentary created by design historian Harriet Atkinson and filmmaker Jane Dibblin, narrated by Michael Rosen, animated by Kate Bilbow, edited by Hugh Hartford and made with support from Four Corners trainees, is launching soon.

The film – made during Harriet Atkinson’s AHRC project ‘The Materialisation of Persuasion’ – explores art’s role in providing a voice, a platform and a meeting point in the midst of conflict. The film focuses on For Liberty, an exhibition mounted in 1943 in the bombed-out John Lewis department store on London’s Oxford Street. Created by the anti-fascist artists’ collective, Artists International Association, this audacious show aimed to demonstrate the values people were fighting for. Central to the exhibition were many artists who had recently arrived in Britain having fled the Nazi threat. The film follows some of the artists who took part, including Oskar Kokoschka, Peter Laszlo Peri, Betty Rea and designer F. H. K. Henrion.

Art on the Streets features interviews with historians Harriet Atkinson, Adrian Shaughnessy, and Gillian Whiteley; and contributing artists’ family members Peter Peri, Will Rea and Max Henrion. It also draws heavily on brilliant archival film and photographs from University of Brighton’s internationally acclaimed Design Archives, Screen Archives South East, Imperial War Museum, Tate, Marx Memorial Library, Henry Moore Institute and private collections.

The team behind Art on the Streets:

Narrator:  Michael Rosen

Directors: Dr Harriet Atkinson & Jane Dibblin

Editor: Hugh Hartford, Banyak Films

Animation: Kate Bilbow

Writers: Dr Harriet Atkinson & Jane Dibblin

Research: Dr Harriet Atkinson

Producers: Jane Dibblin & Carla Mitchell, Four Corners

Production Assistant: Giacomo Baraldi

Director of Photography: Elena Reimeryte

Assistant Director of Photography: Nicholas D. Celano

For further information please contact Carla Mitchell, Artistic Development Director carla@fourcornersfilm.co.uk

https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/

Harriet Atkinson is on Twitter @HRAtkinson1 or on email at h.atkinson2@brighton.ac.uk.

On 3rd February 2023, Harriet gave a seminar on the history of Britain’s contributions to international expos to 40 civil servants from the Department for International Trade and other departments, responsible for delivering the British Pavilion at Osaka Expo 2025.

On 31st January 2023, Harriet was honoured to start a five year term as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal for Design History.

Harriet is in the final stage of preparing the manuscript of her Manchester University Press book Modernist exhibitions in Britain for propaganda and resistance, 1933-53: the materialisation of persuasion. This is the first book-length analysis of exhibitions used for propaganda and political interventions in Britain during the two decades from 1933. Richly illustrated, this study analyses how exhibitions were mounted in public places: from station concourses, to workers’ canteens and, during wartime, in empty shops and bombsites, becoming a key tool for public communication. This book extends our existing knowledge of the work of a range of prominent artists, architects and designers working in Britain including Edith Tudor-Hart, Edward McKnight-Kauffer, Paul Nash, FHK Henrion, Misha Black, John Heartfield, Oskar Kokoschka and Erno Goldfinger. It is being published in Manchester University Press’s Studies in Design and Material Culture series and will be available in 2024.

As part of her project The Materialisation of Persuasion, Harriet is in the process of making Art on the Streets, a new documentary film about propaganda exhibitions mounted on British bomb sites during World War Two, to be launched in spring 2023. The film’s central focus is ‘For Liberty’, an exhibition mounted by anti-fascist group Artists International Association in the bombed-out shell of the John Lewis department store in 1943, to demonstrate the values people were fighting for. The film tells the stories of some of the artists who took part, including Peter Laszlo Peri, Betty Rea and FHK Henrion.

The film draws on archival film and photographs, as well as filming in locations around London and the South East. She is making the film in collaboration with Four Corners, London. Harriet Atkinson is working with co-Director and Producer Jane Dibblin, Director of Photography Elena Reimeryte, Camera Assistant Nicholas D.Celano, Production Assistant and Picture Researcher Giacomo Baraldi and Editor Hugh Hartford.

Harriet’s new book, co-edited with Dr Verity Clarkson (Brighton) and Dr Sarah Lichtman (Parsons The New School) is now available from Bloomsbury Academic. Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges Through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985 contains 13 essays, each exploring transnational exchanges transacted through exhibitions.

Contents:

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Foreword, Jonathan M. Woodham (University of Brighton, UK)
Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: An Introduction, Harriet Atkinson and Verity Clarkson (University of Brighton, UK), and Sarah A. Lichtman (Parsons School of Design, The New School, USA)

1. Universal Civilization and National Cultures: Producing Israel at the Venice Biennale, 1948–1952, Chelsea Haines (Arizona State University, USA)
2. Salvaging through Merchandising: America’s Vietnamese Craft Diplomacy on Display in the USA in 1956 and 1958, Jennifer Way (University of North Texas, USA)
3. “A Slightly Exotic Country”: Poland’s Contentious Debut at the 11th Milan Triennale,1957, Katarzyna Jezowska (UNSW Sydney, Australia)
4. Self-management on Display: Negotiating the Visions of Yugoslav Socialist Modernity at Expo 58 and Porodica i domacinstvo Exhibitions, Rujana Rebernjak (London College of Communication, UAL, UK)
5. “One of the Puzzles of the Exhibition”: A Misunderstood Cittadina, Neoliberty, and the Italian Display at Brussels Expo 58, Rika Devos and Serena Pacchiani (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
6. Assembling Smallness: The United States Small Industries Exhibition in Colombo, 1961, Nushelle de Silva (MIT, USA)
7. Painting from the Pacific and Artistic Exchange across the Pacific, 1961, Ian Cooke (Independent Scholar, USA)
8. “A Wholly American Plastic Package”: Transnationalism, Technology, and Theology at The Vatican Pavilion in the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, Ethan Robey (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
9. “The Gentle Art of Cookery”: Exhibiting Transnational Anglo-Russian Diplomatic History During the Cold War, 1967, Verity Clarkson (University of Brighton, UK)
10. From FESMAN ’66 to FESTAC ’77: Competing Curatorial Strategies for African-American Art at Pan-African Festivals, Lindsay Twa (Augustana University, USA)
11. Designing Stability: Hong Kong’s Pavilion at Expo 70 and Local Expositions, Daniel Cooper (Columbia University, USA) and Juliana Kei (Liverpool, UK)
12. Pharaoh Diplomacy: The Soft Power of the Treasures of Tutankhamun, Mario Schulze (Zürich University of the Arts, Switzerland)
13. A “Tropic-Proof Container Exhibition”: The Role of Environmental Factors in Configuring Design, a Dutch Case Study, Joana Meroz (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands)