Tamar Garb


Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the Department of History of Art at University College London. A researcher of French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Garb has published numerous catalogue essays and books that address feminism, the body, sexuality, and gender in cultural representations. Garb has also written essays about numerous contemporary artists, such as Christian Boltanski, Mona Hatoum, Nancy Spero, and Massimo Vitali. Garb has also organized several art exhibitions, including Reisemalheurs at the Freud Museum in London in 2007, and Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2011. More recently, she has been researching and publishing on the history of art and photography in post-apartheid South Africa, including curating exhibitions on this subject. Garb's exhibition Figures and Fictions was nominated for a Lucie award in Curating.

Education and career

Garb attended the Michaelis School of Fine Art, at the University of Cape Town, receiving a BA in Art in 1978. Moving to London soon after, she received her MA in 1982, and her PhD in 1991, both in Art History, from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She worked at the Courtauld as lecturer from 1988 to 1989, and has taught at UCL since 1989, where she was promoted in 2001 to professor. In 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Works