Alan Powers
Born 1955. Design, architecture and art historian. First visited Kettle's Yard on a school trip in 1972 and had a tour of the house with Jim Ede. Was at the University of Cambridge in the mid 1970s reading History of Art. Duncan Robinson was Alan's Director of Studies. He became student representative on the Kettle's Yard Committee. Jim and Helen had moved to Edinburgh by then and Paul Clough was the live-in curator. He later became involved in hanging exhibitions at Kettle's Yard and did not feel there ought to be a split between the house and the gallery.
Kettle's Yard had a strong impact on him particularly in respect of the home as living space and decoration. He moved to London and ran a gallery for a number of years in King's Cross. Alan now teaches history and the theory of architecture at University of Greenwich.
By: Fay Blanchard, Robert Wilkinson
Length: 1 hour 1 mins
Media: On 2 tracks on CD with summary.
Interview id: MYKY16
Shocked to discover other students criticised Kettle's Yard, mid 1970s
View: Transcript Theme: House as artwork
I guess I was never critical of it, which some of my contemporaries were and it was quite a shock to begin with and then I began to see, well there are actually other things in the world and this isn't the whole truth about everything. I remember particularly Peter Nisbet, who's now the curator at the Busch-Reisinger in Harvard, wrote a piece in Broadsheet magazine, which was one of the student papers, called 'Black Kettle' which was a list of criticisms of Kettle's Yard and that was all quite a shock, you know, I thought, do people really think that? He was at Clare College so I knew him quite well and he had a way of writing these pieces. He'd already rubbished several exhibitions that I'd put on. But I think this is historically quite interesting that, the idea that all the arty students in Cambridge all sort of flocked there, was beginning to be disproven. It might have been the same at earlier periods, there might have been arty students in Cambridge who thought Jim Ede was pretentious, that the whole thing was a bit of a sham before, but I hadn't heard of them.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
