Schools Of Art

A photographic survey of UK schools of art by artist Matthew Cornford and writer John Beck. Contemporary colour photographs of these often architecturally significant buildings are accompanied by captions detailing each art school’s history. Cumulatively they reveal the changes undergone by many of these vital institutions and offer a reflection on the state of art education today.

Artist Matthew Cornford and writer John Beck studied at art school in Great Yarmouth in the early 1980s. Three decades later they found the building boarded up and for sale. Was the closure of this art school of simply local significance, they wondered, or part of a broader story about the changing place of art and art education in the country? Combining fieldwork and archival digging, over the last ten years the pair have explored the towns and cities of the United Kingdom, building a photographic record of each art school building, or the site upon which it stood, and compiling a capsule history of each institution. Cumulatively, the images are a reminder of quite how many art schools there were in the UK, with over 150 still in operation as recently as the 1960s. As contemporary photographs, the images also speak to a complex and varied history of amalgamations, closures, renovations, demolitions and shifting priorities in art education and beyond.

Schools Of Art is a selection of 75 photographs and captions from Beck and Cornford’s ongoing survey, covering the celebrated and the forgotten, the repurposed and the dismantled institutions that fuelled and shaped the creative life of the UK for over a hundred and fifty years. Among the questions raised by this work are fundamental ones regarding the value and significance of arts education and its contribution to the health and prosperity of our towns and cities.