Professor of Fine Art, Gavin Butt has been announced by the Association for Art History as
one of their 2025 Fellows, an honour awarded on the basis of his innovative
research in the field, and its engagement with audiences beyond academic art
and art history worlds.
2025 is the
sixth year for the Association of Art History Fellowship, with Fellows being
recognised for their significant contribution to the broad field of art
history. Fellowships are awarded to academics, curators, educators, artists,
and advocates of Art History who have advanced knowledge within the field or brought
public support and attention to the subject more broadly.
Currently researching histories of UK art education as
Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Professor Gavin Butt is a writer and creative researcher who explores the significance and
impact of visual art in the contexts of popular music, queer culture and
performance.
Professor Butt trained as
an artist and art historian at Goldsmiths and the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at
the University of Leeds, where he completed an MA in the Social History of Art
in 1989. He received his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1998 with the
dissertation Men on the Threshold: The
Making and Unmaking of the Sexual Subject in American Art 1948-1965.
As a successful author,
Professor Butt’s latest book No Machos or
Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk (2022) was launched at a special event at the University of Leeds alongside an exhibition of art by post-punk musicians, Becoming The Ouroboros.
He is also the author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the
New York Art World (2005), editor of After
Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (2005) and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now (2016).
Alongside scholarly output,
Professor Butt works collaboratively on creative research projects including Mixed Up: Music and the Art School (2025), Performance Matters (2009-2013), This Is Not a Dream (2011) and The Art
School Dance Goes On (2023).
Speaking
about the Fellowship Professor Butt said: “I am honoured to have my work
recognised by the Association for Art History and to join other Fellows whose
work has been paradigm-shifting and formative in my own intellectual
development. The award is particularly meaningful to me because it recognises
the contribution of my expressly multidisciplinary work and its address to
readers and audiences across books, project and exhibition curation, LP
production and filmmaking."
Exisiting AAH Fellows include Rasheed Araeen,
T.J. Clark, Kobena Mercer, Griselda Pollock and Lisa Tickner. Joining Professor
Butt as Fellows
for 2025 are Althea Greenan (Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths,
University of London) and Craig Clunas (Professor Emeritus of the History of
Art, University of Oxford).
