Exhibition visit: This Is Just What I Saw, Radar, Loughborough University
Posted: October 5, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, art education, art teaching, Education, Educators, exhibitions, Marion Richardson, Nan Youngman, Pictures for Schools, research, researchers, schools, teacher training, teaching, universities, University of Loughborough Leave a comment
Today she is best known for a method of teaching handwriting, but in the interwar years Marion Richardson’s work in the field of child art was well-known. Pictures for Schools founder Nan Youngman undertook teacher training with her at London Day Training College (forerunner of the Institute of Education) and helped her to organise large exhibitions of children’s work. Richardson’s art teaching was focused on developing children’s confidence and powers of self-expression and critique, aiming to train their ‘inner eye’ and ways of looking as much as their technical skills. One way in which she did this was through the ‘visualisation’ method, where children listened to a description of a place or scene and used it as the basis for their own work. In doing so, Richardson hoped to encourage to see pictures in the places around them, even industrial and everyday scenes not conventionally considered picturesque. Richardson also undertook pattern-making and activities such as fabric design with her students and aimed to encourage children to think about how they furnished their homes. She believed children should be exposed to good examples of art and craft, and have opportunities to discuss these and their own work.
Richardson died prematurely in 1946, but her work and ideas inspired Youngman’s work throughout the rest of her career. Youngman continued to defend them even when they had become regarded as old-fashioned and were superseded among progressive educationalists in the 1960s in favour of more modern ideas about teaching art.
A new installation at Radar in Loughborough, by Berlin-based artist Katarina Hruskova, bears the fruits of an arts-research collaboration with Dr Sarah Mills, Reader in Human Geography at Loughborough University, which involved spending time in the archives at Birmingham City University, where Richardson’s papers are held; the title, This is Just What I Saw, comes from words written on the back of children’s pictures.
Drawing on aspects of Richardson’s teaching and her students’ work, including visual description, Mills and Hruskova held a series of workshops with young people in schools and other educational settings in the Midlands today. The resulting artworks, on show at Radar, translate images from these children’s work into a trio of colourful carpets. Whilst abstract they’re also suggestive of elements of place and natural forms, such as trees and water. Displayed next to them are condensed versions of the texts which were read to children to inspire the images; in the background plays an audio recording of Hruskova reading these same words, an effect that is both poetic and hypnotic. We’re taken on a journey through first an industrial scene and then a forest, where our attention is drawn to details such as the time of day, the weather around us; our senses can’t help but be aroused, our imaginations fired and our memories taken back to places we’ve known and things we’ve seen.
Alongside this is a small selection of images giving a glimpse into Richardson’s own classroom, and her students’ art practice. Whilst in some ways these images appear formal by today’s standards, with children seated at rows of wooden desks, the children are surrounded by their own pictures and patterns, which hang on the walls, giving an impression of a visually rich and engaging environment.
Ideas about childhood, and the nature and purpose of schooling, education and even art have changed considerably since Richardson’s day. By reimagining and reanimating the ideas of this forgotten educationalist, Mills and Hruskova have brought the art teaching of the past powerfully into dialogue with children’s education and experiences today, showing the potential of words and images to inspire creativity and make us look again at how and what we see in the world around us.
This Is Just What I Saw is at the Martin Hall Exhibition Space, Loughborough until Friday 25 October: https://radar.lboro.ac.uk/events/this-is-just-what-i-saw-exhibition/
Exhibition visit: Ruth Ewan – Asking Out, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Posted: October 1, 2019 Filed under: post-war | Tags: archives, art, art education, art teaching, craft, design, Education, Educators, exhibitions, installation art, Oscar Murillo, Ruth Ewan, School, schools, teaching, West Riding of Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Yorkshire, Yorkshire Sculpture Park Leave a comment
Working across a variety of media to explore historical narratives and representations, and bring to light untold figures and stories, Ruth Ewan has long been one of my favourite contemporary artists. I was very excited, therefore, when I heard she had been working with the National Arts Education Archive to develop new work for a show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Asking Out is an installation in the Longside Gallery which explores the work of Muriel Pyrah, an untrained teacher in Airedale Middle School in Castleford. Whilst Pyrah was not necessarily immersed in the latest ideas about teaching, appearing to base her work on her own experiences of teaching and ideas about students’ needs in the classroom, her work fitted with the progressive agenda of the West Riding Education Authority, who celebrated and promoted her ideas as an example of then-fashionable modes of non-hierarchical, child-centred learning which encompassed learning through doing and direct experience.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the concept of ‘asking out’: Pyrah’s students were required to contribute verbally to her classroom, to articulate their work and ideas, to ask questions and to critique each other’s work. From a relatively deprived town in the Yorkshire coalfield, Pyrah’s students were taken out to explore the world beyond the classroom – into local streetscapes, landscapes and industries, further afield to sites of historical interest and even to London.
The aim was to develop confidence in Pyrah’s students, both in themselves and their surroundings. We can see this for ourselves in a set of films made in the early 1970s, towards the end of Pyrah’s career, when the cameras were invited into the classroom in order to share Pyrah’s work, and observe discussions among the children about what they’d seen, learned and experienced. The students appear lively and engaged, if sometimes a little awkwardly formal.
An accompanying publication to Asking Out, containing essays and interviews with some of Pyrah’s former students, complicates the narrative, suggesting that her unorthodox methods did not work for or include everyone. Whilst some students thrived from being expected to talk in front of the class others, perhaps unsurprisingly, found the experience difficult and stressful. Pyrah also appeared to have very particular ideas about the ‘correct’ way of talking; use of local dialect was discouraged, adding to a sense of distance from other students in the school.
Ewan has reactivated and brought to life Pyrah’s ideas, asking us to experience them for ourselves and inviting visitors to participate in and contribute to a reconstruction of her 1970s classroom. The overall impression is stimulating and colourful: the eye is constantly drawn towards text and images. As well as familiar wooden schooldesks, the room is full of artefacts to explore: a piano and songbooks; a nature table, full of tactile objects; maps and photographs showing features of the landscape; books and posters about how everyday goods are made; and a blackboard for writing, sharing and learning the meaning of interesting, unusual, difficult and favourite words.
Above all, what comes across is the sense that the children were encouraged to look. Much of the children’s work, hung up around the classroom, is based on close and careful observation – of nature, of places, of the effect of the seasons.
These historical artefacts are given added poignancy and power through their proximity to another installation encouraging, prioritising and revealing children’s ways of seeing. Frequencies by Colombian artist Oscar Murillo – who is currently nominated for the Turner Prize – brings together canvases on which children from schools across the world have been invited to doodle, as if drawing on their desks like generations of children before them. Displayed flat on table-tops, they reveal the preoccupations of children in very different countries, cities and contexts.
Another complementary exhibition Transformations: Cloth & Clay at the National Arts Education Archive explores tensions between crafts and design, changing ideas about what these mean, and how they interacted with developments in the ways in which art was taught in schools, universities and experimental establishments such as Dartington Hall across the twentieth century.
What became clear to me across both Ewan’s installation and the NAEA exhibition was how many individuals were pioneering creative approaches to learning in post-war schools, and how much more I have to read, learn and think about.
Asking Out is at the Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park until Saturday 3 November: https://ysp.org.uk/exhibitions/ruth-ewan-and-oscar-murillo
Transformations: Cloth & Clay is at the National Arts Education Archive, Yorkshire Sculpture Park until Saturday 3 November: https://ysp.org.uk/exhibitions/transformations-cloth-and-clay
Visit to the University of Hull Art Collection
Posted: September 1, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: artists, collections, Education, Ferens, Hull, Painters, painting, prints, Slade, universities, University of Hull, Willi Soukop Leave a comment
As part of my ongoing interest in educational (and specifically higher education) art collections, I recently went to visit the Hull University Art Collection at the Brynmor Jones Library. Founded in 1963, the collection was housed for many years in the university’s drama facility and concert venue Middleton Hall, designed in 1962 by Festival of Britain architect Leslie Martin, which incorporated a purpose-built exhibition space for the collection when it opened in 1967. The collection has since been returned to the library, which now has a dedicated gallery space.
Unlike other collections I have visited which set out to collect contemporary art, from the outset the collection focused on British art in the period 1890-1940. Due to the relatively minor sum allocated to purchases for the collection – £300 per year was given by philanthropist Thomas Ferens (who also gives his name to the city’s main art gallery) – the collection’s remit was by its own admission the ‘unfashionable and inexpensive’.
In spite of this, the collection gives a good sense of late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century British art, the groupings in which painters were involved (such as the Camden Town Group and Bloomsbury Group), the types of places they travelled to (from the landscapes of Cornwall to more exotic destinations), and the educational system of which they were a part – for example, through the inclusion of paintings by Slade Professor Henry Tonks. The collection is particularly strong on portraiture, further giving a sense of networks and connections between artists (and other artistic figures at the time such as writers). The collection also includes examples of the Contemporary Lithographs, an important interwar patronage scheme: a particular highlight is the floral ‘Still Life’ by Ivon Hitchens.
Mid-twentieth century sculpture is also well-represented, including the work of Bernard Meadows and Henry Moore.
Although the collection has its own exhibition space, a small number of artworks are dispersed around the library and for me the highlights were those I saw outside the gallery: one was a relief by the émigré sculptor Willi Soukop, on one outside wall of the building, which cleverly drew on the brick in which the building is built to depict an owl (the art collection has since acquired a maquette for the piece and other work by Soukop depicting owls). The other was a large hanging tapestry by Harold Cohen, woven by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. Although I hadn’t come across Cohen before, he created a number of artworks for corporate clients – this one was commissioned for the new London headquarters of BP in 1966 – and was an innovator in the use of computers in his work.
The collection no longer restricts itself to its time period of 1890-1940, and has continued to be added to, whether with the support of the Contemporary Arts Society, through the gifting or loan of artworks by members of staff, or through supporters and bequests.
Reflections on the International Standing Conference for the History of Education
Posted: August 1, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: collections, conferences, history, School, schools, talk, West Riding, West Riding of Yorkshire, West Yorkshire Leave a comment
I recently attended the International Standing Conference for the History of Education at the University of Porto, which was themed ‘Spaces and Places of Education’. Although I didn’t attend as many sessions as I would have liked because it was doubling as a holiday and a chance to explore the city, it was a really good opportunity to talk about my research in a different contexts and to hear international perspectives on histories of education.
Of particular interest was the session ‘Educational history and the challenges of justice: Contested spaces and their legacies’, featuring papers by Emily Barker (University of Greenwich), Jona Garz (Humboldt-University Berlin) and Eleanor Simpson (University of Winchester). Covering topics from migrant children’s access to play spaces in post-war Britain, to schools for learning disabled children in Germany, to tabloid moralising around Section 28 and sex education in the 1980s, they explored concepts around justice and justice, ideas about ‘educability’ and who can be educated, socially defined categories of identity and inclusion, acceptance and intersectionality, the construction of social norms around ‘ordinary’ behaviour and family life, the othering of those who do not conform to this, and the spatial borders and boundaries placed around education.
Another session I enjoyed was ‘Transnational entanglements of Educational Spaces: Material, Affective and Imaginative Connections’, which explored transnational influences in progressive education. I was particularly pleased to hear from Lottie Hoare (University of Cambridge) about ‘Vanishing Primary Schools & 1970s Yorkshire’. Hoare’s paper focused on the Open University programme Balby Street Kids. Featuring leaders from the West Riding of Yorkshire education authority (disbanded the year before following the 1974 reorganisation of local government), including the recently-retired Director of Education Sir Alec Clegg, the programme was discussed as a defence and representation of progressive education and its aspirations for an imagined audience. The programme featured children at a school in a West Yorkshire mining community. As well as paying attention to their surroundings, through projects such as creative writing, the programme showed them engaged in movement, giving them physical confidence, as well as drama, in a re-enactment of Beowulf, presenting both a translocal and transnational picture at the same time as presenting a particular vision of English education. Although the programme was a documentary, the question and answer section highlighted its creative approach.
My paper took place in the session ‘Material, Textual, Imagined and Virtual Spaces of Education’. I was particularly interested in a joint paper by Nelleke Teughels and Wouter Egelmeers (KU Leuven) about ‘Lantern Slide Projection in the Classroom: Virtual Spaces of Education (c.1880-1940)’.
Teughels and Egelmeers discussed the use of magic lantern slides in Belgian schools, as objects of direct and indirect observation. In subjects such as history, such visual aids were a way of bringing the inside and outside together, and the object into school. Used for ‘virtual travel’, magic lanten slides were both a substitute for and complementary to field trips, opening up new horizons for students. They highlighted the limitations of the sources they used – two educational journals published from different religious perspectives, which mentioned magic lantern slides without discussing them in detail.
The resulting discussion included comments about the link between photography and ‘truth’, the role of magic lantern slides in classification and the creation of pre-defined categories, and how educationalists wanted to see the world.
Some of the questions directed at the paper could as easily have been asked about Pictures for Schools, such as ‘how did the schools access the materials’ (through catalogues)? Was it possible to find out about the experiences of the students? What was the relationship between the magic lantern slides and object lessons in the 1920s, and educational ideas around intuition and sensing? How widespread was the use of these educational resources (it was often affected by a lack of funds)? How did these resources relate to new technology, such as radio and cinema?
The questions I was asked following my paper also gave me several perspectives to consider, such as:
- How did Pictures for Schools fit into earlier school museum projects?
- The children who answered questionnaires at Pictures for Schools appeared to use sophisticated vocabulary – what preparation did they have for the exhibitions?
- Were all the answers this enthusiastic?
- Was there any relationship betweenPictures for Schools and Elliott Eisner, who was also interested in critical education (and was very important in Brazil, where the asker was based)?
The conference had a strong strand to support early career researchers, and it was particularly beneficial to attend a session about publishing in journals concerning the history of education, such as History of Education Quarterly and Paedegogica Historica. The three pieces of advice that stood out to me were to 1) look at who’s on the reviewing board 2) consider how your work is internationally relevant and make it relevant to people in other countries and 3) that interdisciplinarity is encouraged.
Paper at International Standing Conference for the History of Education, Porto, 19 July: Pictures for Schools: Critical education in the art gallery and the classroom
Posted: July 10, 2019 Filed under: post-war, Uncategorized | Tags: art, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, children, citizenship, conferences, criticism, critics, Education, Educators, Henry Morris, historical research, history, History of Education, Nan Youngman, Pictures for Schools, post-war, public art, schools, talk Leave a commentI am delighted to have had the following paper accepted for the International Standing Conference for the History of Education at the University of Porto next week.
Pictures for Schools: Critical education in the art gallery and the classroom
Pictures for Schools was founded by the artist and educationalist Nan Youngman (1906-1995) to sell affordable works of art by contemporary British artists to educational establishments across the country, including schools, teacher training colleges and local education authorities.
One aim of the scheme was to change the physical spaces in which children’s education took place by making them visually stimulating. Another, equally important motivation, was to develop children’s skills as critical observers, which could then be applied to the places which surrounded them, and the consumer choices they would make as the citizens of the future.
At the first Pictures for Schools exhibition, which took place in 1947 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, children who visited were asked to express their preferences by voting for their favourite exhibit. These preferences were later discussed in accounts of the exhibitions by the organisers, and received with great interest by the press. At later exhibitions, which took place annually at various London art galleries until 1969, visiting school groups were given questionnaires which aimed to encourage them to look closely at the artworks on show, with the questions varying slightly each year. Some questions placed the artworks in relation to children’s own experiences of creating art, encouraging respondents to identify and compare elements such as technique, media, subject matter, styles and genre. Others positioned children as critics, asking them to discuss the artworks they felt were most successful. Children were also encouraged to imagine themselves as future patrons and consumers of the arts, by stating which artwork they would like to take home with them if they were able to.
This paper will explore the ways in which Pictures for Schools offered children a critical education across two types of educational spaces, the art gallery and the classroom. It will visit a series of educational spaces where, in the decade leading up to the Second World War, Youngman established the value of the active, participatory form of art education which would be promoted through Pictures for Schools. These include Youngman’s teacher training at London Day Training College, her time teaching art in girls’ schools in the 1920s, and the decade she spent as peripatetic art advisor to Henry Morris, Director of Education in Cambridgeshire, from 1944 onwards.
The critical education offered through Pictures for Schools will then be placed within a wider context of post-war Britain. After the Second World War, the formal education system was extended. At the same time, opportunities for informal education and cultural experiences went beyond the school, museum and art gallery to encompass public and leisure spaces such as town centres, shopping centres, libraries and housing estates, where citizens were asked to be critical observers of the places and objects which surrounded them every day. This paper will explore the role of artworks as a pedagogical tool and argue that Pictures for Schools played a part in developing the skills of future citizens who were required to play an active, critical part in post-war reconstruction and society.
For more information about the conference visit http://www.fpce.up.pt/ische2019.
I will be taking part in session 4.10, which takes place on Friday 19 July from 9am-11am.
This Land Is Our Land: article about landscape and protest in the Fourdrinier
Posted: July 2, 2019 Filed under: post-war | Tags: art, countryside, drawings, geography, landscape, paper, post-war, writing Leave a commentThe new issue of the Fourdrinier is out today and focuses on This Land Is Our Land at Paper Gallery in Manchester (open Saturdays 11-5 until 3 August), a new group exhibition inspired by Marion Shoard’s classic book of the same name and the Kinder trespass. I’ve written an essay around some of the themes explored in the show, such as access to the countryside, and the ways in which our experiences of the countryside are mediated physically and culturally, drawing partly on some of the reading around landscapes I did during my PhD.
Read online: www.thefourdrinier.com/physical-land-visual-landscapes
Exhibition visit; Joy For Ever: How to use art to change the world and its price in the market, Whitworth Art Gallery
Posted: June 4, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, Art history, exhibitions, Great Exhibitions, loan collections, Manchester, nineteenth century, school loans services, schools, taste Leave a comment
Marking 200 years since the birth of the writer, critic and teacher John Ruskin, Joy For Ever brings together archival material and historic and contemporary artworks to profile and interrogate Ruskin’s ideas, question whether they have relevance today, and ask what a ‘socially useful’ art might look like now and in the future.
Although it’s not exclusively focused on Manchester, some of the most interesting content in the exhibition relates to the ways and places in which the people of the city have been exposed to and encouraged to interact with art, craft and design over time, including during the city’s nineteenth century industrial heyday and resultant population explosion. This includes material relating to the Art Treasures exhibition which was held in Old Trafford in 1857, in the vein of the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace in London, and the Horsfall Art Museum in Ancoats. I discovered that the latter set up a picture loan scheme in 1890, lending sets of pictures to schools including Manchester Grammar School. Ruskin himself was a teacher as well as a prolific writer and lecturer; particularly interesting was a section relating to his teaching of women, at a time when women’s education was not encouraged, and the types of topics he considered it necessary for them to study, including science, ecology and economics.
Nevertheless, the exhibition acknowledges that many of Ruskin’s ideas now appear old-fashioned at best. For example, it shows how Ruskin and contemporaries such as William Morris sought to influence people’s taste, and the way in which they lived, by designing and promoting products and furnishings aimed at introducing ‘good’ craft and ‘design’ into the home. Aside from the problem of who gets to decide what and what isn’t ‘good’ design, these were, of course, priced well beyond the reach of the workers at which they were aimed.
Joy For Ever is at the Whitworth Art Gallery until Sunday 9 June: www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/upcomingexhibitions/joyforever/
