Luke Fowler : commission to collect

23 Jun-14 Oct 2012

Overview

The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott focuses on the work of the Marxist historian Edward Palmer-Thompson, who, from 1946 (at the age of 24), was employed by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) to teach literature and social history to adults in the industrial towns of the West Riding. These classes provided education to people who had been historically unable to access a university education. E.P. Thompson became synonymous with the discipline of ‘cultural studies’ that emerged in Post-War Britain, along with fellow northern socialists Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. Pertinently, Fowler’s commission will be shown in parallel with the gallery’s new major collection rehang Post-War British Sculpture and Painting.