Partnerships

  

Researchers from the Centre for Modernist Studies work with museums, galleries and other arts organisations to bring their work to audiences outside of the university.

The Centre is situated in a region with a strong modernist history, as is reflected in the modernist collections of many of its museums and galleries. In April 2025, Dr Hope Wolf published a book entitled Sussex Modernism with Yale University Press. She is also curating an exhibition at Towner Eastbourne of the same title that runs from 23 May - 28 September 2025. This advances the work she began in 2017 with an exhibition at Two Temple Place, London. The new exhibition runs from the late nineteenth century to the present, and it brings together artists who made work in rural, coastal, wooded and urban parts of the region. It compares and contrasts their different ideas about how art should be made and life lived. It also shows how work with regional collections can offer ways of challenging the canon. 

We also engage with organisations outside of the region. In 2018-20, Wolf worked with the De La Warr Pavilion, Camden Arts Centre and Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange on curating A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff, and the Birth of Psychorealism.

The collaborative work of the Centre has often involved students. In 2018-2019, Wolf and Helen Tyson co-curated with Rosie Cooper and their students an exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion focussing on the year 1935. In 2020, students worked with Berwick Church on a Heritage Lottery Fund project to preserve the Bloomsbury murals.

The Centre runs events frequently with the Keep (an archive proximate to the University of Sussex), for instance on the Anna Mendelssohn papers, and on the archives of May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. We also work with other research centres and networks. Our biggest research event was in 2013, when Sara Crangle brought the Modernist Studies Association international conference to Sussex.