Skip to main content
School of Business and Management
  1. School of business and management
  2. Staff
  3. Academic Staff
  4. Profiles

Dr Gavin Grindon

Gavin

Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries

Email: g.grindon@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Roles:

Biography:

I am an art historian whose work focuses on contemporary and modern art, curating, museums and contexts of cultural policy. My research ‘outputs’ take the form of academic writing and curated exhibitions and public projects.

A major area of my research is activist art, and histories and theories of art and culture related to protest and social movements. This involves working across fields such as art and design history, social movement studies, curating and museum studies, cultural policy and heritage and labour history.

In 2014 I co-curated the exhibition Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, about objects of art and design produced by protest movements internationally since the late 1970s. It was, surprisingly, the museum's most visited exhibition since 1946. In 2015 I curated Cruel Designs, an exhibition examining design for social control (from CCTV and workplace surveillance to anti-homeless spikes, border fences and rubber bullets) at Banksy's Dismaland. In 2017 I co-curated a Palestinian-led Museum of the Occupation at Banksy's Walled off Hotel in Palestine. In 2018, I co-curated From Nope to Hope, which included work by Tania Bruguera, Jeremy Deller, Dread Scott, Shepard Fairey, Milton Glaser, Guerrilla Girls and others. In 2019 I co-curated a satirical Museum of Neoliberalism with the artist Darren Cullen which is currently open for tourists and school visits in South London. In 2022, I was a co-curator of Werbepause, an exhibition on adbusting and its histories at Kunstraum Kreuzberg. I have organised film programmes and conference events at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and the V&A, and consulted for museums and galleries internationally. I’ve written about activist art and protest cultures for Third Text, Art History, The Oxford Art Journal and elsewhere; and my writing on activist art has been translated into 8 languages.

I was a member of the collective Liberate Tate, who from 2010 produced performance interventions in Tate spaces to pressure the organisation to drop BP sponsorship, which it did in 2016. This was the first in a wave of similar moves by other cultural institutions, and of a wave of 'museum protest' which continues today. Museum protest and arts funding debates remain an interest, and I’ve written about this for Social Text and The New York Times.

Before joining Queen Mary, I was Senior Lecturer in Curating and Art History at the University of Essex; and before that a research fellow and curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. I completed my PhD in Cultural Criticism at Manchester University in 2007 under Prof. Terry Eagleton.

Back to top