This paper investigates historicization as a queer(ing) practice through the analysis of the Grunderzeit Museum of Mahlsdorf (Berlin). Created in 1960 by trans-activist and antiquarian Charlotte Von Mahrsldorf in a XIX Manor House, the Grunderzeit Museum presents a collection of 17 period rooms that are still today presented to the museum ́s audience as an exemplification of the bourgeois aesthetic taste of the Grunderzeit period (1860-1900). Self-identified as “a 1870s maid,” Charlotte occupies a significant position both in the realm of heritage conservation in Germany, as well as a referent figure for the visibility of gender and time dissent, which she understood as intertwined social constructs.

The museum remains relevant today due to its commemoration of Charlotte’s intense biography and the museum ́s function as a meeting point for the East Berlin queer community. The lower rooms of the museum are particularly relevant to the construction of this narrative, as they are dedicated to the reconstruction of the Mulackritze, a renowned queer venue frequented by personalities such as Marlene Dietrich or Magnus Hirschfeld. Departing from the current exhibition and its relation to other LGBTQ+ memory institutions in the city, this text explores how the museum serves as both a testament to Charlotte’s history and the LGBTQ+ community and a means to challenge traditional notions of history and historicity.

By critically examining her appropriation of Gründerzeit aesthetics as camp and kitsch zones of critical fabulation (Saidiya Hartman, 2008) and cruising utopia (Esteban Muñoz, 2009) against an oppressive present, this research seeks to address issues of agency, representation, and the potential for both subversion and perpetuation of normative frameworks within the context of reenacting and memorializing historical figures who challenge conventional understandings of gender and sexuality. Through her rejection of the temporal confines of bourgeois reproduction, longevity, safety, and inheritance, Von Mahlsdorf’s life invites us to reexamine and queer our historical narratives, fostering an emancipatory practice of heritage.

Pablo Santacana López (he, him) works as an artist and researcher focusing on archives, activism, and performative memory practices. He co-leads the graphic collective Humo_Estudio and is currently enrolled as PhD student at the Fachhochschule Erfurt and the Bauhaus University Weimar. In 2023 he co-hosted a panel around the queering oif heritage at the VI CHAM International Conference “Heritage for a Common Future / Futures for a Common Heritage” in Lisbon. He has also published texts on queer monuments (Arts and Society, forthcoming) and the musealization of queer nightlife (Arch+ 2020, Kaltblut 2021).

At a time of climate crisis disproportionately threatening ecosystems composed of human and more-than-human bodies, this research extends architectural thinking beyond its anthropocentric disciplinary traditions. It proposes a ‘quare’ (Irish/UlsterScots subversion of queer) ‘hum-animal’ (Still 2015) architectural history of Ulster, a liminal ‘borderland’ which rejects Ireland’s North-South divide.

It does so through interrogating architectural assemblages particular to Ulster’s largest industry; poultry manufacturing. Still recovering from Brexit, this monocultural ‘monster-machine’ embodies patriarchal legacies of English colonial-capitalist exploitation enacted on Irish landscapes. This has recently manifested through the entanglement of Ulster’s poultry bodies with ‘toxicpolluted’ (Calvillo 2023) waters at Lough Neagh – the UK and Ireland’s largest waterbody owned by English aristocracy. The exportation of such agri-industrial waste highlights the intersection of spatial-environmental and colonial inequalities. It also reflects the intermingling of technical-organic matter particular to poultry farming and its resulting ‘chicken-assemblages’, which now contribute to global human-made climate change.

Faced by these socio-political and ecological concerns at bodily, spatial, and transgeographical scales, this research disrupts the industry’s technoscientific anatomy and Ulster’s architectural conflict-canon by introducing a ‘quare-environmental’ sensibility and plurality to the region’s contemporary ‘troubles’ (Haraway 2016).

In doing so, this study uncovers a multiplicity of uncanny situated histories, or ‘architectural hexes’, of the often othered ‘hen’ and ‘henwife’ whose interspecies kinship underpins Ulster’s socio-economic, mythological, and ecological temporalities. These architectural hexes therefore facilitate quare encounters between indigenous ‘relational female-avian ecologies’ and normative ‘rural political-poetic agri-tech-tures’ interconnected with Ulster’s poultry history. By spatially mapping and writing at the intersections of these conflicting spatial-material assemblages, embodied and technoscientific knowledges, and practices of care and colonial-capitalist exploitation, this research attempts to queer, problematise, and ‘reworld’, hum-animal infrastructures needed for navigating these troubling times.

Dean Black is a queer, Ulster-born Architectural Writer-Designer currently leading the Irish Architecture Foundation’s placemaking strand. They will begin their doctoral studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture in 2025. Despite successful escape from the family farm in Tyrone, agricultural landscapes and their intersection with spheres of architecture, ecology, queer studies, and posthumanism form the basis of their work. Their recent works include ‘Porta-Bello Poultry Pavillions’ with Future Island-Island, ‘Clatchen’ with National Museums NI, ‘Essilage: On the Etiquette of Cutting Grass’ with Outburst Queer Arts, ‘Bent Over Straight Lines’ with Sam’s Eden and Belfast Metropolitan Arts Centre, and ‘Telephone House’ in the book Glamour and Gloom published by the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.

The memorialization of the image of HIV/AIDS necessarily involves elements of dark as well as queer heritage. This paper explores the artistic and architectural registers used to respond to the challenges of this type of memorialization, using the aidsmemorial.info database set up in the Netherlands in 2011. That database organizes these memorials through an artefact-led typology, as does the only attempt so far to extend this analysis and reflect upon the range of material types that have been deployed as ways of conveying the enormity of the AIDS pandemic. This paper will instead seek to explore the memorialization of HIV/AIDS by examining the relationship of architectural form and location within the local environment to the functionality of lieux de mémoire. It will draw upon all the 225 memorials around the world listed in the database, from the first to be established, in Vancouver in 1985, to those which are still at the planning and design stage, such as the one currently envisaged for London. In the process, it will locate these memorials within the longer history of memorialization, reflecting on the use of themes derived from earlier architectural/artistic tropes. At the same time, it will consider how these memorials respond to their various socio-cultural settings, often shaped by homophobia, fear and ignorance. The paper will close by reflecting on:

• whether there are recurring themes in the architecture of these monuments
• how far they can be seen to reflect a queer aesthetic and/or capture and respond to a queer experience when, of course, many of the victims of HIV/AIDS are not LGBTQ+
• the extent to which these memorials succeed in queering space and stimulating awareness of the tragedy of the AIDS pandemic and the enduring death, trauma and stigma associated with it.

Pippa Catterall is Professor of History and Policy at the University of Westminster. She is also a board member of the Heritage of London Trust and of AIDS Memory UK (the body promoting the London AIDS memorial) and co-editor of National Identities. Her recent published work has focused on the history of monuments and statues and her current research involves developing the themes addressed in her co-authored 2021 report on Queering Public Space.

This talk will explore some of the traces of queer histories around the emblematic Hotel Gondolín in Buenos Aires. As an architect involved in its renovation during 2022-2023, Revuelta have had the opportunity to immerse in this space’s rich history and experiences, which is not only a home but also a symbol of pride and self-management for the travesti/trans* community for over 25 years.

During the renovation process, these walls and rooms laden with history transformed, not only physically but also symbolically. Through interviews, photographic archives, and testimonials, it was possible to reconstruct some of the shared experiences in this space: from public events to moments of intimacy, traces of shared and collective housing. The renovations not only improved living conditions but also marked a transitional moment for those who had inhabited and resisted the place for decades. This work is framed within the conference’s call to explore how queer experiences have shaped built environments throughout history, and how these often marginalised narratives can reveal new ways of understanding urban pasts and presents.

This work will seek to showcase different stories and experiences traversing this emblematic space by recovering and articulating some of these traces. In this way, it will be possible to begin to illustrate the complex link between travesti/trans* histories and their practices of spatial autonomy, as these social relations are spatially produced, both with narratives and experiences. In this way, it can be revealed how part of the community has been building in a collective, organised and autonomous action a theory of its own that employs the spatial as a crucial metaphor for developing knowledge, politics and communities.

Facundo Revuelta (He/Him) is an architect specializing in public policy and gender equity. My work, research and activism are focused on the development and implementation of projects centred on queer and trans* housing, commoning and community initiatives, prioritizing the experiences and spatial dynamics of Queer individuals and communities.

This paper will focus on two questions. Firstly, the concept of the “poker-faced house,” an evolving analytical category for the study of 20th and 21st century domestic architecture. The notion of a “poker-face” typology significantly expands the application of queer theory to architectural history (and to the study of modernism in particular) by proposing a new tool for the analysis of houses and other living environments in which unremarkable or opaque public-facing walls (historicist, vernacular, or otherwise conventional in style) can be “cracked open” to reveal radically unconventional interior spaces, plans and sections that accommodated the spatial needs and priorities of queer households and individuals. These examples of architectural camouflage and interior experimentation challenge us to rethink the meaning of transparency in modern domestic design and to reevaluate the prevailing canon of heteronormative and masculinist International Style examples.

Secondly, there will be a look at queer interpretation of urban apartment buildings and courtyard houses in New York and Paris from the 1920s and ‘30s, focusing on an example from my book (in press) about the queer composer and photographer Max Ewing. It will be shown how Ewing, like many other queer city dwellers in this period, created a mixed-use interior and hybrid program where he and his friends could live, work, and entertain – in short where they could be “quite regularly gay,” as Ewing (quoting Gertrude Stein, often put it) without fear of surveillance or censure by public institutions or social gate-keepers.

Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of Art, emerita at Wellesley College. She is the author of numerous books and articles on gender, sexuality and architectural history, including “Max Ewing’s Closet and Queer Architectural History,” Pts. 1 and 2, Platform, (online) Oct. 8 and 21, 2019; Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (1998), American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture (2010) and the forthcoming book-length study Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York.

Kevin D. Murphy is Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University where he is also professor and chair in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Previous to his role at Vanderbilt, Prof. Murphy was on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City. He has published widely in the fields of American and European architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the co-author, with Mary Anne Hunting, of the book, Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism, forthcoming from Princeton University Press early next year.

Manchester Gay Centre was originally built in 1988; a small unassuming post-modern inspired block – boldly constructed the same year Section 28 came into law. Designed by the City Architect and influenced by the Planning Department, it was the first purpose-built community centre for LGBT+ people in the UK. Conceived and realised by a dedicated number of activists, the building was funded by and with the unwavering support of the Local Authority. Manchester was one of a handful of councils that could be argued as having influenced Section 28’s conception by the then Conservative government. The Gay Centre is a built realisation of a community’s resilience to discrimination and prejudice embodied in that law.

This paper will detail the establishment of the building, examining its visual appearance and layout and how the design mechanisms present are not only directly linked to the social, economic, and political context of the 1980s but also serve as indicators for how a “safe space” was designed specifically for LGBT+ people in that context. Aesthetic choices will be analysed and explained through visual analysis, photographic studies as well as archival material and information gleaned from interviews with the original architect and a key activist.

When it opened in November 1988 the Gay Centre provided a much needed safe, accessible, and dry (alcohol-free) space for social activity and support services. It served the community for over thirty years and was demolished to make way for a new LGBT+ Centre, which opened in 2022. As a space designed exclusively for LGBT+ people, analysing the building’s design process can provide an important contribution of the idea of “Queer Space” as architecturally designed, especially when considering its successor’s contemporary interpretation.

Emily Crompton is an Architect and Senior Lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture. She has been researching the Manchester LGBT+ Centre for over 10 years, uncovering its original history and working on the engagement and design for a new Centre. Her primary research interest is in collaborative and participatory design. Other projects include age-friendly cities, community asset mapping, and feminist design practice. She is passionate about getting as many people as possible involved in decision-making about the design of spaces, buildings, neighbourhoods, and cities. She is also a founding member of Queer Educators in Architecture Network (QuEAN).

With the rise of popular nightlife in nineteenth-century London, the imperial metropolis took on a newly libidinized charge. Gaslighting, alongside concessions in leisure time afforded to mid-century workers, led to the formation of new urban rhythms, metabolisms, fiery atmospheres and commercialised pleasure districts. Bright, flickering streets and architectures produced a heightened economy of desiring glances just as much as commercial spectacle or coercive surveillance. Taken together, this constituted a new form of what Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff call “pyrosexuality”: a mode of sexuality inseparable from and mediated through fire.

Building on Clark and Yusoff’s “Queer Fire” (2018), alongside queer (techno)ecology and ecosex discourses, this paper seeks to extend the history of sexuality out into the material and energetic conditions of urban life: the technologically-mediated environments which constituted modern subjectivity – particularly the lighting infrastructures which jointly enabled, disciplined and sustained queer life. To do so, it will draw out and develop related themes from my PhD on firelight in imperial London.

The literary and visual culture of the fin de siècle is particularly teeming with erotic nocturnal imagery. Here I will draw on a series of Punch cartoons, a painting by Eugene McSwiney, a poem by Richard Le Gallienne, as well as the dripping, phallic candles of Aubrey Beardsley. Each speaks to the imbrication of fire, atmosphere and desire in a manner that moves beyond mere metaphor. Far from being relegated to the shadows, we find queer sexuality imbued in the very light sources themselves, albeit in “clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse”, as Foucault puts it (1878). This early history also provides useful points of reflection for our contemporary queer night spaces and infrastructures which are so under attack in the metropolis.

Adam Walls previously worked in architectural practice before completing his PhD in architectural and urban history and theory at UCL. His thesis, ‘Twilight Spaces’, investigated the transformation of London’s nocturnal and racial atmospheres during the era of high imperialism. Current research is working towards a theory of ‘photosexuality’. This work is interdisciplinary and brings together literary, visual and material culture with new materialist, decolonial and queer approaches to the built environment. He teaches at Greenwich and UCL, where he is co-author of an open-access curriculum ‘Race’ and Space and an organising member of the Bartlett’s Decolonial Reading Group.

Queer images, spaces, and kinship can be seen developing in the polaroid photographs which Tom Bianchi took of himself and male friends posing in his West Village Manhattan apartment in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Best known for his polaroids of beautiful men in Fire Island, the photographer took a spatial turn in his book, Tom Bianchi: 63 E 9th Street: NYC Polaroids 1975–1983 (the apartment’s address). A long-contemplated project finally published in 2019, the lushly illustrated, evocative book explained how Bianchi and friends formed a space for community. He described how several of them helped him rebuild his apartment and how the glamorous results appeared in a men’s lifestyle magazine in 1979. Transformative for Bianchi, the apartment’s publication prompted him to come out, leave his job, become a professional artist, and a gay activist. Confirming Michel Foucault’s prognosis in Friendship as a Way of Life (1981) that community would be as defining as sex for queer people, kinships formed in the apartment resembling those in Gay Macho (1998), anthropologist Martin Levine’s study of 1970s West Village queer life.

The apartment helped transform Bianchi and his subjects into the self-identified “gay” men of the late 1970s. In performative ways in this interior, Bianchi and friends confronted the homophobic conditions of their youth. They posed as jock-strapped athletes, recreating scenes from 1960s homoerotic, physique pictorial magazines – an adolescent pleasure then dampened by fear and shame. Self- referentially, Bianchi photographed himself and his camera reflected in a mirrored wall, thus ingeniously making the entire apartment into a camera. Bianchi’s collaborative refashioning of his home recalls how queer people used apartments and lofts for forming related images and identities, as in the “pad films” of fellow polaroid enthusiast Andy Warhol. Analyzed together, these exercises show how the interior, the photograph, and the publication together opened up significant “spaces” for forming queer communities.

Timothy M. Rohan is associate professor and chair of the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was the first to discuss his subject’s queerness in his book, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph (Yale, 2014, now in its third printing). Recent publications, such as “Queering the Minimalist Interior” in The Art Bulletin (March 2024), have delved into space and queerness as part of a larger book project about 1970s Manhattan interiors. In spring 2024, he spoke at Philip Johnson’s Glass House estate in New Canaan, Connecticut about the queerness of its renovated “Brick House.”

Anchoritic practice was centred on sensory deprivation, with cellular architecture forming the structure within which sight could be shaped, focussed, and directed. However, within the cell existed a powerful individual that transcended the binaries of life and death, solitude and community, sacred and profane. The structure of their cells realised the complex considerations of sight revealed in Medieval optical theory, but also cemented the anchorite’s liminality.

This paper explores the concept of queerness within the architectural confines of anchoritic cells in Medieval England. By utilising ‘queerness’ in its broadest sense, this research will consider the anchorites’ figurative transformation within the cell, and explore the role that sight and sexual anxiety had in constructing their unique, and queer, solitude. Drawing upon medieval theories of sight and visual culture, this paper delves into the intricate dynamics of control and sexual anxieties embedded within the architectural features of anchoritic cells. Specifically, it examines the strategic positioning of squints—small apertures through which anchorites observed the altar and engaged with the external world—as sites of both surveillance and liberation.

Comparatively little consideration has been given to the role of architecture in anchoritic practice, and even less to the wealth of material the surviving building fabric offers. Utilising three-dimensional models, this study reconstructs the visual perspectives afforded by these squints, shedding light on the unique spatial experiences of anchorites. This interdisciplinary study offers new insights into the complex interplay between architecture, gender, and spirituality in medieval England. By foregrounding the agency of anchorites and the transformative potential of their lived experiences, it invites a reconsidering of the multifaceted nature of queerness within the medieval built environment.

Lucy Branchflower is a scholar specialising in solitary architecture. A recent graduate from the University of Cambridge’s MSt in Building History, she uses multi-disciplinary methods to investigate solitude’s impact on lived and sensory experiences. Her previous work includes an award-winning undergraduate dissertation on art-making in modern solitary confinement, and an analysis of the anchoritic cells of Sussex and Surrey. She currently works in architectural conservation at the Palace of Westminster, and has recently been recommended for appointment to the Independent Monitoring Board of HMP Belmarsh.

Since the early 1990s, Montréal’s Village has been anchored by Parc de l’espoir (Park of Hope), a living memorial to the victims of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Québec. The park, currently in its third iteration/remodeling, is shaped by activist thinking and ongoing discussions around how to remember people who have died from AIDS. The prominent position of the memorial in Montréal’s LGBTQ neighbourhood highlights how activists, governments, and the public approached the panidemic in the specific majority French-speaking bilingual context of Québec.

Unlike other metropolitan centers where much early AIDS discourse was occupied by how to deal with bathhouses and sexuality, Québec’s activists and institutions quickly moved to the issues of how to care for HIV-positive people and how to make visible the importance of prevention and treatment. Activists were in contact with groups in other cities, especially New York’s ACT UP, both also developed actions specifically tied to their francophone culture, with a focus on humour and irony, that influenced some of the decisions for the development of the park/memorial.

Furthermore, as memorialization was taking place elsewhere by remembering specific names, such as in the AIDS Quilt, much debate in Montréal focused on the need to avoid naming specific people and to instead remember the collective experience of the pandemic and think about the future of the community. The original ACT UP Montreal design team, which included landscape architects, thus created a space divided in two that celebrated both the dead and the living. The team, still active today and officially sanctioned by the city to care for the park, has also been much involved in thinking about how the Village, which emerged in the early 1980s in parallel to the early years of the pandemic, still plays a role as both a community nexus and a living memory of past LGBTQ struggles, such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The paper will thus make visible the central, but until now never discussed, role that the architectural characteristics of the park have played in Québec’s public perception of the pandemic and, more broadly, of queer people.

Olivier Vallerand is a community activist, architect, historian, and associate professor at Université de Montréal’s School of Design. His research focuses on how self-identifications intersect with the use and design of the built environment, on queer and feminist approaches to design education, and on alternative design practices. His book Unplanned Visitors: Queering the Ethics and Aesthetics of Domestic Space, winner of the 2021 IDEC Book Award and 2022 ASID Joel Polsky Prize, discusses the emergence of queer theory in architectural discourse. His current research projects focus on the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis on the built environment in francophone contexts and on the use of research-creation methods in exploring LGBTQ heritage.

Anthony Raynal is a PhD student in film studies in a co-supervision program between the University of Montreal and the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. His thesis focuses on the political representations of homosexual desire in the context of HIV/AIDS in films from 1981 to 1997. He specializes in Cultural Studies and examines the political, cultural, social, and moral issues surrounding representations of sexuality and death during the epidemic. He is also a member of various research groups, including Olivier Vallerand’s project about the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on architecture and design.

It is now well known that for two decades, Kelmscott Manor was home to a queer couple, May Morris and Mary Lobb. Queering Kelmscott is a project that need not be limited by questions of historic individuals’ identities. Nevertheless, the recent recognition of Morris and Lobb’s queer domesticity makes an analysis of Kelmscott as a queer space all the more urgent. To paraphrase the quotation from Marko Jobst in the call for papers, what modes of queerness remain suppressed in Kelmscott Manor and how can they be made visible? Embracing an expansive definition of queer, this paper examines Kelmscott’s capacity to undermine the normative and the binary. Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed, among others, the paper explores how methods informed by queer theory can make explicit Kelmscott’s subtext, both as a space and as a discourse. The house shares many of the characteristics architectural historians have identified in queer spaces: screens, closets, interconnected rooms and a plan that refuses heteronormativity. Equally significant is the language that has been used to describe Kelmscott since the 1870s, when the Morris family acquired it. The literature on the house is filled with the vocabulary of love and desire. Often now referred to as a ‘retreat’, the house was, for William Morris, a ‘harbour of refuge’. Exploring Kelmscott both as a physical site that can be encountered in the present, and as a layered text that has built up over a century and a half, this paper considers the metaphor of retreat in more depth, investigating how Kelmscott is a place to experience queer time and space.

Dr Imogen Hart’s publications include Arts and Crafts Objects; two co-edited volumes, Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts, with Jason Edwards, and Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary, with Claire Jones; and recent articles in Art History and the Journal of Interior Design. She completed her PhD in History of Art at the University of York. After fifteen years in the US at Yale and UC Berkeley, she recently returned to the UK, where she is a Teaching Fellow in the History of Art at Oxford Brookes University and Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Craft.

Historical and architectural archives are not neutral spaces; they systematically exclude voices based on gender, race, and sexuality, among others. This exclusion creates incomplete narratives, as seen in nineteenth-century India, where colonial historiography and institutionalization of the archive marginalized alternative storytelling forms such as literature, folksongs, and embroidery, erasing the histories of marginalized bodies. Queerness embodies destabilization and nonconformity, and challenges the desire for stability and permanence, thus holding an antithetical relationship with the colonial archive. In this context, how can we imagine alternative ways of narrating and conserving queer histories? This paper proposes embroidery as a method of producing queer histories, with a focus on Gujarati embroidery that I inherit from my mother.

Embroidery allows for the presentation of unsanitized, non-normative, non-linear, and layered stories. In Gujarat, embroidery adorns daily domestic items like grocery bags, curtains, blanket covers embodying hidden yet indispensable labor for the nourishment and sustenance of loved ones. Historically, it has served as a medium for stories excluded from dominant narratives, making it an ideal medium for preserving queer histories. To demonstrate this, and to gain an embodied experience, I will create an embroidered tablecloth capturing quotidian queer spatial experiences from my childhood. By using regional embroidery techniques, to tell personal spatial histories I aim to dislodge the hegemony of queer theory rooted in the Global North and offer a perspective and method grounded in the South Asian context.

Akshar Gajjar is an architect and urban and territorial designer and is currently a researcher at EPF Lausanne. His research transects architecture, urbanism, ecology, and queer studies. He studied architecture at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, and MAS in Urban and Territorial design at EPFL and ETH Zurich. He is coauthoring a publication Better together: More-than-human ecologies for architectural thinking (Birkhauser, 2025) with Dr. Sonal Mithal and has presented his work at American Association of Geographers annual conference. His forthcoming co-authored essay in Delus journal investigates human, land, water relationships in Kashmir map shawls and produces an embroidered response to them.

James Cahill is an author, critic and art historian. His debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, was published in 2022 in the UK by Sceptre Books, and was shortlisted in 2023 for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. His second novel, The Violet Hour, will be published in February 2025. He writes for publications including Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, the Burlington Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph. In 2018, he was the co-curator of ‘The Classical Now’ at King’s College London (2018), a major exhibition examining the connections between contemporary art and classical antiquity. The same year, he was the lead author of Flying Too Close to the Sun (Phaidon Books), a survey of classical myth in art from antiquity to the present day. He has written books and essays on contemporary artists including Cecily Brown, Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Juan Muñoz and Richard Patterson; and he is currently researching a book on David Hockney’s 1967 painting, Beverly Hills Housewife, for publication by Thames & Hudson in 2025. He is based between London and Los Angeles.