Professor Gail Day is this year’s Pilkington Visiting Professor in Art History
Gail Day, Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at the University of Leeds, has recently been announced the Pilkington Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester for 2025/6.
The Pilkington chair in Art History is among the oldest chairs in Art History in the country. It was founded in 1956 by sisters Margaret and Dorothy Pilkington, who were born in the 1890s in Lancashire to the wealthy Pilkington family – owners of Pilkington Glassworks and the Pilkington Tile Company.
Previous Visiting Professors have included Ingrid Pollard, Chila Burman, Malcolm Bull, Briony Fer, Cornelia Parker and Griselda Pollock.
Gail Day, Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at the University of Leeds.
Gail Day is Professor of Art History and Critical Theory in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.
Her research into the conjunctures of ‘aesthetics and politics’ focuses on questions of form, methods in the social histories of art and the cultures of capitalism.
Gail’s 2010 book Dialectical Passions: Negation and Art Theory (Columbia University Press) was shortlisted for the Isaac & Tamara Deutscher Prize.
Published by Verso in 2025, Gail’s latest book – Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula, co-authored with Steve Edwards – was shortlisted for the Library Journal Prize for Best Books of 2025.
Book cover, showing ‘Chief mate checking temperatures of refrigerated containers. Mid Atlantic’. From Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1995).
Gail said:
“I am thrilled and honoured to take up the prestigious Pilkington Visiting Professorship in Art History for 2025-26.
“For my Pilkington Visiting Professor public lecture, I will be speaking about Carmela Gross’ Roda Gigante.
“I will also be running a session for undergraduates on photography, drawing on the Whitworth’s archive.
“Another session, for doctoral researchers, will focus on a section of Amphibious Realities, my recent book on Allan Sekula.”
Carmela Gross, Roda Gigante [Big Wheel] at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, 2024. Photo: João Nitsche. Courtesy of the artist.
Gail’s Pilkington Lecture in Art History will address research into Brazilian visual artist and educator Carmela Gross. Her presentation has emerged from research collaborations with DESFORMAS (Centro de Estudos Desmanche e Formação de Sistemas Simbólicos) at Universidade de São Paulo. Gail said:
“In my lecture, I will ask the question: what happens when an artwork that seems to be strongly grounded in one context moves to another?
“The consensus has long been that the work must be diminished – becoming a mere copy, abstracted from its site, and emptied of its animating content. But what if we ask questions not only of ‘site specificity’ but also of ‘historical specificity’, and if we draw on the critically expanded approaches to the latter?
“My talk will attend to Carmela Gross’ extraordinarily striking, large-scale installation Roda Gigante (Big Wheel), tracing its passage from its first manifestation in 2019 at Porto Alegre’s Farol Santander to its 2004 iteration in São Paulo’s SESC Pompéia.
“Carmela Gross’ aesthetic and political ‘dialogue’ with Lina Bo Bardi, the architect for SESC Pompéia, not only opens fresh perspectives on Roda Gigante but deepens and sharpens its historical charge.
“Central to the discussion of the social materiality of aesthetic expression are Brazilian debates on ‘objective form’, involving Antonio Cândido, Roberto Schwarz and Luiz Renato Martins.”
More information
Gail Day’s lecture – Roda Gigante: Carmela Gross, Lina Bo Bardi, and Objective Form in Brazil – takes place on 29 April at the University of Manchester. It is free to attend and all are welcome.
This annual event is organised by the Department of Art History and Cultural Practices at the University of Manchester and co-sponsored with the Whitworth.
Full details including how to book your place can be found here.
Feature image
Carmela Gross, Roda Gigante [Big Wheel], at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, 2024. Photo: João Nitsche. Courtesy of the artist.
