Dr Andrew Cummings

Biography

I am an art historian specialising in queerness and contemporary art in transnational and global contexts. My principle interests lie in researching, writing, and teaching about queer, feminist, and anti-colonial practices of science fiction which critically reorient our relationship to ourselves, our bodies, and each other—including the more-than-human world of bacteria, microplastics, and viruses. I have explored these topics in a range of publications, from peer-reviewed articles on queer ecologies and apocalypticism in South Korean contemporary art to creative non-fiction on voice and breath in Derek Jarman’s film 'Blue'. They also informed my PhD thesis, which focused on work by artists with East/Southeast Asian heritage and was completed in 2023 under the supervision of Wenny Teo and Sook-Kyung Lee.

Since 2022 I have worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute for the project Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation, and Heritage. Led by susan pui san lok, this project seeks to address structural inequalities in the arts by surfacing bias in public collections of modern and contemporary art in Britain. Grounded in my investment in the possibilities and limits of art and its spaces as sites for facilitating social justice, my research for this project examines how work by modern and contemporary queer artists of colour lives in British art collections: that is, how and when such work has been acquired, displayed, and narrated. At present, I am focusing on the work of David Medalla and Hamad Butt.

My art historical interests also inform my work as an events programmer and facilitator. Most recently, I have organised and facilitated events including an interactive workshop on grief and queer ecologies for a non-academic peer inquiry group on grief, death, and loss; a conversation about contagion and imperialism between the artist Candice Lin and academic Neel Ahuja, in collaboration with Spike Island Gallery, Bristol; a full-day panel on art and disease at the Association for Art History conference; and a dialogue on abolitionism and trans aesthetics with artist Wu Tsang and theorist Che Gossett for the Courtauld Institute.

I feel particularly strongly about engaging wider publics in art. In this vein, my work with the Courtauld Gallery and Tate has included giving pop-up talks on photography and activism in 1980s Britain, queer reinterpretations of saints depicted in fifteenth-century paintings, and present-day trans/anticolonial artistic responses to nineteenth-century painting. I have also taught on the Courtauld Institute’s Summer University programme for state school students interested in studying Art History.

I am open to future project contributions, writing and speaking opportunities, event organisation and facilitation, and other collaborations. I can be reached at a.cummings@arts.ac.uk.