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Jessica Sjöholm SkrubbeProfessor

About me

Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe is Professor of Art History.

PhD in Art History from Uppsala University in 2007 on the dissertation Skulptur i folkhemmet. Den offentliga skulpturens institutionalisering, referentialitet och rumsliga situationer [Sculpture in the Swedish welfare state. Institutionalisation, referentiality and spatial situations 1940-1975].

2003-2009 Acting senior lecturer in Art History and Gender Studies at Uppsala University
2010-2012 Research fellow at the Department of Art History, Stockholm University
2010-2012 Member of the Leverhulme trust funded International Research Network Transnational Perspectives on Women’s Art, Feminism and Curating
2015-2017 Director of Graduate Studies in Art History, Stockholm university
2019- Editor of Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History
2019- Titular member of Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA)
2020- Member of the International Advisory Board for the research project The Feminist Legacy in Art Museums (funded by the Norwegian Research Council, project leaders Dr. Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen & Dr. Sigrun Åsebø)
2021- Coordinator of research in Art History, Stockholm university
2022- Member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the book series Stockholm Studies in Culture and Aesthetics, Critical Editions in Culture and Aesthetics, and Basic Readings in Culture and Aesthetics published by Stockholm University Press

Teaching

I teach undergraduate, master, and graduate courses and supervise theses on all levels. I have had special responsibility for the undergraduate courses Art, Architecture and Visual culture in Sweden and Art History II and for the master course Gender Perspectives on Art and Visual Culture.

I was institutional partner of the CIVIS school Transitive Modernities/Modernisms in Transit, initiated and organised by Anne Reynès-Delobel (Aix-Marseille University) and Stamatina Dimakopoulou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), and was a teacher at its first summer course for master and doctoral students Modernisms in Transit: Dialogues and Crossings (Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence) in 2021. I organised its second summer school Transitive Modernities: Mobilities, Mediations, Circulations (Stockholm University, June 2022) together with Andrea Kollnitz and participated in its third course module, the blended intensive programme In/transitive Modernities: Dis/continuities and Cultural Transformation, which took place online and on-site at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens during spring semester 2023.

Research

My research interests include the modern art world, art and feminism, art and transnationalism, public art, sculpture, and feminist historiography.

Current research

My current research project, Swedish artists en route. Mobility, transnationalism and artistic practices in the early 20th century, investigates artistic mobility in the early 20th century, resulting in the first study that thematically addresses transnational movements in Swedish modern art. It departs form the observation that the strong focus in Swedish art history on the pivotal artist journey to Paris serves as a reductive description of artists’ actual movements, practices and networks. Without questioning Paris as an artistic node, the project differentiates established narratives and restores the diversity of Swedish artistic mobility from a transnational perspective and offers a corrective to modernist art history’s concept of stylistic diffusion from centre to periphery. Informed by transdisciplinary theories on mobility, cultural transfer, and transnational historiography, it details on the diversity of artistic movements and historicises the meanings and politics of mobility through analyses of how it was visualised, narrativised and habitualised in artistic practices. The project comprises of case studies that focus on representative routes and destinations, represent different forms of transnational movements, and address the social power relations (e.g. gender, ethnicity, nationality) of artistic mobility. The project is funded by Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council).

Completed research projects

Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art (2017-2021)

Based on hitherto overlooked archival material, this research project studied Nell Walden’s significant impact on the Sturm organisation through a feminist reading of supportive labour that highlights the centrality of collaborative work within the modern art world. The results of the project are published in the monograph Nell Walden, Der Sturm and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art (Routledge, 2021). The book introduces Walden as an ardent collector of modernist and indigenous art and critically contextualises her own art production in relation to gendered ideas on abstraction and decoration. Visual analyses highlight how she collaborated with artists and experimental photographers during the Weimar era. Finally, the book provides an analysis of Walden’s continuing collaborative work as Der Sturm’s archivist and historiographer after her voluntary exile from Germany to Switzerland in the 1930s and thus highlights the importance of women’s supportive labour for the canonisation and institutionalisation of modern art in museums and archives. The project has been generously supported by Landskrona museum, Åke Wibergs Stiftelse, Magn. Bergvalls Stiftelse, and Stiftelsen Längmanska Kulturfonden.

Curating Differently (2013-2016)

The general objective of this international, collaborative project was to present scholarly analyses and critical reflections on the diverse practices of feminist art curating and exhibition practices from the 1970s onward. Two main questions formed the framework for the project: How can the diverse practices feminist art curating and feminist exhibitions be theorized and historicized? Which feminist theories and methodologies have informed the strategies of feminist art curating? The project resulted in the anthology Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces (2016), which brings together case studies from Australia, Israel, Europe, and North America that critically account for diverse strategies and interventions in curatorial space. The essays contribute with historical perspectives on feminist exhibition practices and curatorial models, first-hand accounts of feminist interventions within the art museum as well as timely analyses of current intersections of feminisms within curating in the contemporary global art world. As a major contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate on the institutionalization of feminisms in art and its relative success, or failure, Curating Differently provide new insights and provoke further discussion on the history and theory of feminist art exhibitions and curatorial spaces. The publication of the anthology Curating Differently was generously supported by the Lars Hierta Memorial Foundation. 

Networked practices in Herwarth and Nell Walden's Der Sturm (2011-2015)

The project investigated Herwarth and Nell Walden’s Der Sturm as a cultural, social, and spatial network constituted by a broad spectrum of individuals as well as objects and practices. It showed that the networked structure of the organisation resists the neat categorisation of binary, gendered concepts such as private and public, personal and professional, art world and domestic life. In this context, Nell Walden clearly emerged as a main protagonist in Der Sturm together with her partner, the organisation’s founder Herwarth Walden (see J. Sjöholm Skrubbe, "Das Ehepaar Walden und die Vernetzungen des Sturm in Schweden", 2015; J. Sjöholm Skrubbe et al., Nell Walden & Der Sturm, 2015). The project’s focus on relational aspects not only rendered visible the cultural and social connections between individuals within the avant-garde, but also highlighted how diverse practices of dissemination (e.g. collecting, exhibiting, mediating, marketing) and different types of visual objects (artwork, photographs, postcards, et cetera) operated as significant actors in a pan-European network (see J. Sjöholm Skrubbe, "Modernism Diffracted: Picture Postcards from The Sturm Gallery and Walden Collection in Berlin", 2013. As such, the project also highlighted how the avant-garde’s transnational network runs counter to established traditions of writing national art history. The project was generousely supported by the Swedish Research Council, Magnus Bergvalls Stiftelse, and Åke Wibergs Stiftelse.

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • L’art public: De la construction nationale à la démocratisation

    2024. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe. L’Art nordique, 201-221

    Chapter
    Read more about L’art public

  • Routes and Ruptures: Swedish Artistic Mobility in the Early Twentieth Century

    2022. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe. Artl@s Bulletin 11 (2), 21-35

    Article

    This article presents the results of an empirical study of Swedish artistic mobility during the first decades of the twentieth century, a period associated with the emergence of modernismin Swedish art and with Paris as an unquestionable point of reference. Without questioning Paris as an artistic node, it highlights the discrepancy between art history’s narrativisation of transnational mobility and the diverse artistic itineraries that empirical material evidences. Focusing on Swedish artists’ travels in France, Germany, Denmark, and Italy, it offers a geohistorical trajectory that differentiates established narratives.

    Read more about Routes and Ruptures

  • Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art

    2021. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe.

    Book

    Based on hitherto overlooked archival material, this book reveals Nell Walden’s significant impact on the Sturm organisation through a feminist reading of support-ive labour that highlights the centrality of collaborative work within the modern art world.This book introduces Walden as an ardent collector of modern and indigenous art and critically contextualises her own art production in relation to expressionist concepts of art and to gendered ideas on abstraction and decoration. Visual analyses highlight how she collaborated with professional and experimental women photogra-phers during the Weimar era and how the circulation of these photographs served as a means to intervene in the public sphere of culture in interwar Germany. Finally, the book provides an analysis of Walden’s continuing work for Der Sturm after her voluntary exile from Germany to Switzerland in 1933 and highlights the importance of women’s supportive labour for the canonisation and institutionalisation of modern art in museums and archives.The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, and gender studies.

    Read more about Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art

  • Curating Differently

    2016. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe.

    Book (ed)

    Exhibtionary spaces and curatorial strategies ideologically frame the encounter between art and its publics. For more than forty years, feminist art curating, as a practice of art interpretation and a politics of display, have intersected with the diverse area of feminist art historical research and feminist artistic practices. It is only recently, however, that a theorization of feminist art curating and feminist exhibition histories as a specific field of knowledge have emerged.

    Curating Differently is a collection of essays that offers critical perspectives on and analyses of the intersections of feminisms, art exhibitions, and curatorial spaces from the 1970s onward. It brings together case studies from Australia, Israel, Europe, and North America that critically account for diverse strategies and interventions in curatorial space. The essays contribute with historical perspectives on feminist exhibition practices and curatorial models, first-hand accounts of feminist interventions within the art museum as well as timely analyses of current intersections of feminisms within curating in the contemporary global art world.

    As a major contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate on the institutionalization of feminisms in art and its relative success, or failure, Curating Differently will provide new insights and provoke further discussion on the history and theory of feminist art exhibitions and curatorial spaces.

    Read more about Curating Differently

  • Vardagsliv, normer och värderingar

    2014. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Henrik Widmark. Bebyggelsehistorisk tidskrift (67), 24-44

    Article

    Housing estates in post-war cities have been con-stituted at the point of intersection between the private domestic sphere and the public space of the community at large. Housing estates, there-fore, are important places where urban identity is created, articulated and renegotiated. Every-day use of housing estates entails a continuous negotiation and shift of consciously formulated societal notions and norms which are materiali-sed in the physical configuration of space.

    In a case study addressing the everyday are-as, architecture and artistic design of the urban space on three Borås housing estates, we have shown how both reworkings of the physical en-vironment and shifting norms in society, plus the everyday use and mediation of housing estates continuously alter their significance in processes of identification. Aided by insights from network theory and intersectional gender theory, we have described and analysed the mat-ter of how present-day housing estates are be-ing created globally and how notions of gender, class and ethnicity are constructed at the point of intersection between the concrete expression of material space and the everyday practices of the social space.

    Read more about Vardagsliv, normer och värderingar

  • Constant Redistribution

    2013. Angela Dimitrakaki (et al.). Journal of Curatorial Studies 2 (2), 218-241

    Article

    This discussion between nine curators, theorists and art historians addresses some of the contemporary issues related to feminism and curating. Topics include the role of the geographical and geopolitical in curatorial projects; the place of canons and canon-making in feminist approaches; the nature of contemporary feminist collectivities; the importance of the museum and its context of capitalism within politicized curatorial practice; and the status of the object and aesthetics in feminist-oriented curatorial practice.

    Read more about Constant Redistribution

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