Programme Curator, Cat Gibbard, reports on Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange’s on-going project to take the Arts Council Collection into local classrooms as part of the galley’s National Partners Programme.
In 2018 as a response to the growing crisis in arts education, we began to investigate what action we could take as an art gallery to support creativity in the curriculum. This led us to open an ongoing conversation with local primary and secondary schools which began with the question ‘How can we help you?’
Newlyn School, whose pupils are regular visitors to Newlyn Art Gallery, asked if we could support the delivery of basic art skills within their curriculum. We thought a great way to develop a programme with them would be through our partnership with the Arts Council Collection, beginning with the installation of nine pieces of work at the school in October 2019 around which we devised a series of activities to punctuate the twelve months the works were on loan for.
These include Arts Award Explore for Year 6, a creative writing session delivered by The Writer’s Block for Year 4, a Big Draw event with the whole school and, the pièce de résistance, a Palace of Culture originally programmed for June 2020.
This participatory project will transform Newlyn Art Gallery into an inspirational setting for three weeks of intense, art-based activity, programmed by Cultural Secretaries, artists Sophie Butler, Theo Carter Weber, and photographer Oliver Raymond Barker - as directed by the children. For this, the school will lend seven of the art works to the Gallery to form part of the set, returning to the school when the doors of the Palace close.