Monica Ross

Ethical Actions

A Critical Fine Art Practice

British artist Monica Ross (1950-2013) generously contributed forty years of socially engaged, feminist-informed, and performance-based work, which has had—and continues to have—a transformative impact on contemporary art, art education and society.
Susan Hiller & Suzanne Treister’s fully illustrated publication documents Ross's works from 1970 to 2013. Publication Purchase

Monica Ross produced drawings, performances, videos, text and multi-media works which often resulted from durational processes, sequential actions or events. Time-based in form and concern, her work addressed how we experience events in the present and the cultural transitions which transform them, or not, into memory and history. Her works have been presented in many exhibitions and contexts since the 1970s, when feminism and other movements for social, cultural and political change were formative in shaping her experimental and often collaborative art practice. Ross also curated exhibitions and published critical essays and text works such as her artistʼs book valentine (2001). She was Acting Course Director and Lecturer, MAFA, University of Brighton 2006-2009; Guest Professor, Institut fur Kunst in Kontext / Art in Context MA, University of the Arts, Berlin 2004; AHRB Research Fellow, Fine Art, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2001-2004; Senior Lecturer, Fine Art, Saint Martins School of Art, London 1985-1990; and Subject Leader of Critical Fine Art Practice, Central Saint Martins, London 1990-1998.

Anniversary — an act of memory

Robert Ayers in-progress performance - committing the UDHR to memory towards future recitations

MRA & Friends

Monica Ross Archive & Friends

Exhibitions

Monica Ross: Unquiet Woman

Phoenix Art Space

19 July - 31 August 2025

Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood

Hayward Gallery Touring - Hetty Judah

9 March 2024 - 13 July 2025

Lives Less Ordinary

Working-Class Britain Re-seen

25 January 2025 - 20 April 2025

Su Richardson: In Stitches

8 March - 1 June

Women In Revolt! - Tate Britain

Art, Activism and the Women’s movement in the UK 1970–1990

8 November 2023

Monica Ross - Ghost in The Spinning Mill Halle 14

Retrospective Exhibition. Click still image on Halle14 website for exhibition stills

17 September - 18 December 2022

The Ignorant Art School | Sit-in #4 | Outside the Circle

18 October 2024 – 1 February 2025

The Time of Our Lives

24 Jan 2024 – 21 Apr 2024

Radical Landscapes Tate Liverpool

5 May 2022 - 4 September 2022

Radical Landscapes

William Morris Gallery

19 September 2022 - 7 January 2023

Monica Ross: A Critical Fine Art Practice

Gallery North, University of Northumbria - March 2017

a Locus+ project

Archival material and works from 1970-2013. Details

curated by Susan Hiller and Suzanne Treister

An Anniversary – an act of memory inspired recitation opened the exhibition.

Monica Ross: A Critical Fine Art Practice

CHELSEA space

16 November - 16 December 2016

Valentine

Nothing Less! 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage

A Woman's Place