Deanna Petherbridge Archive Now Fully Catalogued

Deanna Petherbridge’s career challenged conventional boundaries, merging artistic practice with academia. Her life’s work, which is documented in the archive and now fully catalogued with its descriptions searchable online, illustrates this. The collection demonstrates how she contributed to scholarly and artistic discourse from the perspective of a practitioner, offering insights different from those of a purely academic scholar.

The archive is an exceptionally rich resource, comprising material created and compiled by Petherbridge throughout her life from the 1960s to the 2020s and offers a detailed insight into her multifaceted career as an artist, writer, curator and educationalist; the incredibly varied initiatives with which she was involved; and her extensive travel. 

As a visiting artist and academic – often supported by the British Council – Petherbridge undertook numerous studio residencies, lecture tours and fellowships in countries such as Australia, Pakistan, United States and especially India, which she visited on many occasions. 

The core of the collection is a series of nearly two hundred “Annual Files” which record Petherbridge’s numerous professional outputs and diverse interests across decades of practice. Her use of these files for the arrangement of her records is unusual among art historians and other professionals working in the field of art history. As well as revealing the sheer volume of projects and initiatives in which she was simultaneously involved, they demonstrate that she did not compartmentalise her work from her personal life, or her artistic practice from her teaching and writing.

This way of organising her records tells us something important about Petherbridge’s creative and academic practice; she did not divide herself into separate professional identities. Her artistic practice, her teaching, her writing and her personal life constantly informed one another, and the archive preserves that interconnectedness.

Materials relating to her work as a practicing artist include: sketchbooks and notebooks; price lists; correspondence with galleries; and planning documents relating to solo and group exhibitions. Her artworks are not held in the archive and are managed by the Artistic Estate of Deanna Petherbridge.

Throughout the archive there are also files which document the planning, execution and public response to Petherbridge’s major exhibitions and publications including most notably: The Primacy of Drawing (YUP, 2010; revised Thames & Hudson 2026); and The Quick and the Dead and Witches & Wicked Bodies, which toured the UK in 1997 and 2013-2014 respectively.

A key highlight of the collection is the extensive correspondence; including exchanges with artists, academics, and gallery and museum professionals worldwide, which reveal the international networks within which Petherbridge operated. Unusually, Petherbridge retained copies of the letters she sent as well as those she received, contributing to the richness of the collection by showcasing complete conversations. Her correspondence is thoughtful, intellectually rigorous, funny and always very honest, offering particularly vivid insights into her thoughts on a wide range of subjects, including the motivations and inspirations behind her drawings.

Beyond documenting Petherbridge’s career, the archive serves as a valuable resource for researchers across multiple disciplines. These include: studies of sponsorship and patronage in the arts; public art; vernacular architecture; solo travel; drawing practice and theory; freelance and self-employed artistic careers; the role of women in the arts and art and architectural history; and the intersections between art and architecture.

Materials in the archive include correspondence, photographs, research notes, sketchbooks and visual materials such as flyers, posters and a wide range of ephemera.

To celebrate the completion of the catalogue, the Centre has planned a series of initiatives, including a display Just on the Edge featuring material from the Deanna Petherbridge Archive, alongside original Petherbridge artworks, and a conference, Drawing as Knowledge: Practice, Theory and History, which explores Petherbridge’s concept of “drawing as visual thinking” within the context of British art history.

Sincere thanks to Gillian Lazar and Steve Sacks for their continued support and encouragement of all activities involving the collection, including the cataloguing project, current display and upcoming conference.

The catalogue descriptions for the entire collection can be searched using the online catalogue. If you would like to consult this archive, please make an appointment or send an enquiry.