Kathleen Quaintance is a historian of modern(ist) visual culture, a critic, and a craftsperson, and is currently a PhD student at Yale in the department of History of Art. They write about twentieth-century conversations between the precariously delineated and often fluid spheres of art, craft, and design, and propose pattern and decoration as a bridging idiom. Recently, they have worked on British women designers in the first half of the twentieth century who used regional popular art, everyday objects, industrial machine processes, and high-modernist developments simultaneously in their pattern design. One of their central passions as an art historian is the incorporation of embodied methodologies into the field, and they would very much like to correspond with other art historians and/or curators who work with their hands – or encourage those who might like to begin this kind of practice. More widely, they work on queer theory in and about art history, complicating modernisms in architectural history, material marginalities, artistic labour and workshop practice, and dissecting epistemologies of art.
Kathleen completed an MSt in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oxford as an Ertegun Scholar. Recently, they have been working on a project called Archival Post which seeks to make creative time and space for anyone who works on or with archives to convene in alternative ways, especially through the epistolary form. They have also worked as a printmaking studio technician, a craft teacher, a poster designer, a cheesemonger, an assistant curator of the collection of modern British art held at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a museum educator.
