A TEESSIDE University academic is helping lead a remarkable project to unlock a lost art archive.

The £440,000 international collaborative project is led by MIMA School of Art & Design Professor Simon McKeown, and a German researcher to help show how disability was interpreted in the past.

Prof McKeown, an award-winning internationally exhibiting artist renowned for his work on disability, will examine the disability related artworks collected by German educationalist Hans Würtz at the turn of the twentieth century.

Read more: University helping retain Teesside's skills in secondary teaching

He will work with Prof Dr Oliver Musenberg, of Humboldt University in Berlin.

Würtz, who was known for his prominence in German special education during the time of the Weimar Republic, was an avid collector of artworks related to disability and impairment.

The project is jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation and German Research Foundation.

It will shed light on the historical context of Würtz’s collection, which features thousands of artefacts, to help to explain its role in the construction of identity in relation to disability.

It is one of 19 collaborative research projects to receive funding through a partnership which brings together arts and humanities researchers.

 

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