Tate Papers no.36 2025
The articles in this issue explore how histories are built, sustained, questioned or overlooked by institutions. Two groupings of articles emerge from recent research projects. The Archive is a Gathering Place (2024) brings together videos and artist commissions to consider the future of archives that are collectively owned or created. The second group includes art historical case studies and artist interviews from Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage (2021–4), a project exploring how museum data and interpretation contributes to structural inequalities and biases in national collections.
Alongside these projects, the researcher Janet Couloute draws on her experience as a guide in the galleries to examine how tropes of whiteness are constructed in early modern portraits through a series of audio pieces. Finally, the art historian Jon King presents new archival research on Ethel Walker’s self-fashioning in the male-dominated art world of early twentieth-century London.
Editorial
The Construction of Whiteness, Gender and Race in Early Modern Portraits
Ethel Walker, Advocacy and Recognition in the Early Twentieth Century
The Archive is a Gathering Place
Transforming Collections?
Transforming Collections Information at Tate: The Case for an Embedded, Artist-Directed and Object-Centred Ethos
Interview with Evan Ifekoya
Lost and Found? Hamad Butt at Tate
Interview with Erika Tan
