Gavin is a historian of art, culture and ideas. His research focuses on activist art alongside histories and theories of art and culture related to protest and social movements. This involves working across fields such as art and design history, social movement studies, curating and museum studies, cultural policy, heritage and labour history. After nearly 30 years of research and involvement in this area, he has written a long history of activist art, Art is Our Weapon, forthcoming with Thames and Hudson.

He has also produced influential writing on modern and contemporary art, especially the politics of surrealism and dada; radical intellectual history and theory; curating; heritage and cultural policy. His work has been translated into eight languages. Besides writing, his research takes the form of exhibitions and public projects. In 2027, he is co-curating Surrealism From Below: Art and Protest at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh with Prof. Dawn Ades, on surrealism’s relationship with social movement cultures.

His past exhibitions include Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014-15), the first project to address objects of art and design produced by protest movements as a field. It was, surprisingly, the museum's most visited exhibition since 1946. He also co-curated the museum in Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel in Palestine and the Guerilla Island area of Banksy’s Dismaland theme park. The latter included Cruel Designs, an exhibition examining design for social control from CCTV and workplace surveillance to anti-homeless spikes, border fences and rubber bullets. With artist Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives/Darren Cullen, he co-curated The Museum of Neoliberalism, open in London to tourists and school groups from 2019-2024 and The Apocalypse Museum at 2025’s Glastonbury festival. In 2022, as part of a collective he co-curated Werbepause, the first gallery show on subvertising and its histories, at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin.

He was a member of the collective Liberate Tate, who from 2010 produced performance interventions in Tate spaces to pressure the organisation to drop BP sponsorship, which it did in 2016. This was the first in a wave of similar moves by other cultural institutions, and of a wave of 'museum protest' since.

Before joining King's, he was Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curation at the University of Essex; and before that a research fellow and curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He completed his PhD, an intellectual history of the idea of revolution-as-festival, at Manchester University under Profs. Terry Eagleton and Ken Hirschkop.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Gavin’s primary research focus is on the politics of art, culture and heritage. His work makes a claim to outline a distinct field of the study of ‘social movement cultures.’ In this field he has produced the first comprehensive academic studies or exhibitions on various activist artists and groups, most notably the 1960s group Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.

More broadly, he is interested in histories of art, design, cultural production and cultural labour since 1900, with a particular focus on the politics and organisation of cultural production, especially a) cultural production understood ‘from below’, in emergent, grassroots, non-professional or nascent professional forms and b) critical and investigative approaches to cultural institutions and forms. He has described his approach as ‘art history from below,’ and he engages with diverse methods and debates across the arts and social sciences. Some of his recent work has explored the use of digital and spatial methods: for example in reconstructing the cultural materials and performances of the 2011 Syrian uprising by forensically examining a large dataset of the camera phone footage of participants; or in mapping landscape painting’s relationship to historic land enclosures; or in compiling and open-sourcing the most comprehensive map of British monuments related to slavery.

Gavin welcomes PhD proposals on art and social movements or in any of the above areas.

Past PhDs supervised include:

Text-Based Street Art as a Form of Resistance in Present-Day Russia.

Printed Textiles and Propaganda During the Cold War.

The COBRA Committee and the Aesthetics of Government Response.

Situating Psychogeography’s 1990s Revival.

The Photographic Transgressions of Raoul Ubac.

Past PhDs examined include:

A Question of Socio-Political Configuration: Artistic Practices in Community, Culture and Public Spaces.

Indigenous Relational Space and Performance: Curating Together Towards Sovereignty in Taiwan and Beyond.

Situationist Margins: The Situationist Times, King Mob, Black Mask, and S.NOB Magazines (1962-1970).

Swimming Upstream: Small Visual Arts Organisations in the Midst of the Ethical Turn, 1990-2016.

The Collective and Criticism After Conceptual Art: Institutional Critique between The Fox and Group Material - 1975-1989.

Teaching

Gavin teaches on a range of modules across CMCI on topics in art, activism, youth cultures, cultural theory, cultural policy, curation, creative production and arts management.

Expertise and public engagement

Gavin’s research has been featured in the media on multiple occasions, including 6 BBC features, including BBC TV News and Radio 4’s Front Row and Design Dimension shows; 6 New York Times features, twice on the front page and once as an invited columnist. Channel 4 News has twice presented its program live from projects he co-curated, including interviews with him. Le Monde Magazine ran a biographical feature on Gavin’s curatorial work and it has had extensive international coverage in specialist art and design media.

His curatorial projects are bound to public engagement. The Apocalypse Museum at Glastonbury Festival 2025 received around 12,000 visitors in 3 days, hosted workshops for cultural and activist groups, and supported Greenpeace’s campaigning and recruitment.

The Museum of Neoliberalism was opened as part of events around the 2019 Labour Party conference and continued to engage visitors, with a four-star recommendation in Time Out, until its closure in 2024 when it was knocked down and turned into luxury flats.

The Walled Off Hotel in Palestine is one of the country’s leading tourist attractions and contributes to Palestine’s solidarity economy. Gavin’s work there informed a 2021 REF impact case study, which included supportive testimony from the Palestinian Minister for Tourism.

Dismaland received around 150,000 visitors. Visit Somerset estimated the project brought £20m of extra investment to Somerset. The sections Gavin curated involved collaborations with grassroots and NGOs groups including Acorn Tenants Union and Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

Disobedient Objects at the V&A received around 450,000 visitors with no advertising support, the most visitors to a V&A show since Britain Can Make It in 1946 (the only V&A shows with more have been, since this, the Alexander McQueen and Christian Dior shows, which used extensive marketing campaigns, including extended opening hours and which ran for two months longer (Dior)). The exhibition’s ‘how to’ guide for a makeshift tear gas mask moved from the museum to the streets when it was used by participants in early Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (and bizarrely was reproduced as a prop and plot device in the J.J. Abrams film ‘10 Cloverfield Lane’).

Gavin has been invited to speak at Cambridge University; CUNY Graduate Centre; the Royal Geographical Society; the Royal College of Art; Queens Museum New York; M+ Museum Hong Kong; Universidade Anhembi Morumbi; Museum of Modern Art Warsaw; the Architecture Association; McGill University; Humbolt University Berlin; UCL; University of York; the Courtauld Institute; Modern Art Oxford; Autograph ABP and elsewhere. He has also organised film programmes and conference events at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and the V&A, and consulted for museums and galleries internationally.

Gavin has acted as external examiner for programmes in Curating; Art History; Design History; and Philosophy, Politics and Aesthetics for the RCA, Goldsmiths, Brighton and Kent universities. He is a fellow of the HEA.

Selected publications

• Grindon, G. 2027. Art is Our Weapon: Creative Activism in Times of Crisis. London: Thames & Hudson.
• Grindon, G and Flood, C. 2014. ‘Disobedient Objects’ In Disobedient Objects, V&A Publishing, 2014. Republished in Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art. 2024. MIT Press/Whitechapel; Design (&) Activism, Mimesis, 2019; The Idea of the Avant Garde - And What It Means Today, vol.2. NeMe, 2019; translated into Portuguese for Design/Art/Technology journal, 2019; Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Participation and Occupation. IB Taurus, 2015.
• Grindon, G., Williams, J. and Hay, D. ‘Mapping British Public Monuments Related to Slavery.’ Slavery and Abolition 45:2. 2024.
• Grindon, G. ‘Curating With Counterpowers: Activist Curating, Museum Protest and Institutional Liberation,’ Social Text 155 (41:2), 2023.
• Grindon, G. ‘Poetry Written in Gasoline: Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker,’ Art History, 38:1, 2014.
• Grindon, G. ‘Surrealism, Dada and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism and Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde,’ Oxford Art Journal. 34:1, 2011.