The Courtauld Gallery, London

In 2009, the Courtauld Gallery mounted an exhibition entitled Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913-19 (18 June – 20 September), curated by Dr Alexandra Gerstein, curator of sculpture and decorative arts. Bristol lecturer Grace Brockington has published on the history of the Omega Workshops, and her research contributed to the planning and presentation of the Courtauld show. She advised the curatorial team, and was invited to write a catalogue essay on the Omega Workshops during the First World War, which was published as 'The Omega and the End of Civilization: Pacifism, Publishing and Performance in the First World War' (in Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913-19, ed. Alexandra Gerstein, Courtauld Gallery, 2009). The exhibition drew attention to an important episode in British design history, and made rare archival material available to the public, both through the exhibition itself and online. It was critically acclaimed as 'a key exhibition, a revision that examines an important episode in British art... the catalogue is excellent - a major contribution to the scholarship of the period’ (Studio International, 22 July 2009).

Life, Legend, and Landscape: Victorian Drawings from the Courtauld Collection (The Courtauld Gallery, London, 17 February – 15 March 2011) was a collaboration between staff and doctoral students from the University of Bristol and the Courtauld Institute, London. The show drew attention to the quality of Victorian draughtsmanship across a range of genres: life studies, landscapes, genre scenes and subjects from literature and legend. It featured works by most of the major artists of the age, including J.M.W. Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Aubrey Beardsley, and it was recommended in the press as 'a small but perfectly formed exhibition that reveals the astonishing variety and quality of Victorian drawings and watercolours' (Country Life). The accompanying catalogue published essays by students and their supervisors from both institutions, and included an introduction by Elizabeth Prettejohn, founding leader of BARC at Bristol.