Enfilade

Registration for this HECAA Great Conversation (open to non-HECAA members) is available here:

Turner in 2025: Reflecting on the Anniversary Year’s Exhibitions

With Chloe Wigston Smith, Richard Johns, Lucinda Lax, and Melissa Gustin

Online, 23 January 2026, 12.30 EST / 5.30 GMT

J.M.W. Turner, The Wreck Buoy, first exhibited in 1849, oil on canvas, canvas: 93 × 123 cm (Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery).

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in 1775. To mark 250 years since his birth, a number of anniversary exhibitions were organized across the United Kingdom and the United States in 2025. Some contextualized Turner with other notable contemporaries; others focused on specific aspects of his career or mined collection holdings. This roundtable will bring together four curators of three Turner anniversary exhibitions to ask them to reflect on their exhibitions and ponder together what it means to exhibit Turner today.

• Melissa Gustin is Curator of British Art at the National Museums Liverpool, and curator of Turner: Always Contemporary at the Walker Art Gallery.

• Lucinda Lax is Interim Head of the Curatorial Division and Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, and curator of J.M.W. Turner: Romance and Reality.

• Richard Johns is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of York. Along with Smith, he was a co-curator of Austen and Turner at Harewood House.

• Chloe Wigston Smith is Professor in the Department of English at the University of York and Director of its Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Along with Johns, she was a co-curator of Austen and Turner at Harewood House.

Join us on Friday, 23 January 2026 at 12.30pm EST / 5.30pm GMT for this HECAA Great (Zoom) Conversation. The event is open to current and prospective HECAA members; so please share widely in your networks.