In recent weeks I have had reason to connect back to the early days of gallery education and to some of the inspiring (almost exclusively) women who were key to its development. Firstly I have been collating tributes and writing my own celebratory obituary to Sue Clive, OBE. Sue was an inspirational figure who was instrumental in developing gallery education programmes at a number of galleries including Cornerhouse in Manchester and the Arnolfini in Bristol in the 1980s and 1990s. Jenni Lomax, OBE is an equally important and influential figure, who developed and headed up the Community Education and Public Programmes department at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from 1979 to 1989, before going on to be the Director of the Camden Arts Centre. I had the pleasure of hearing Jenni in conversation with artist Mohammed Adel and Dr Richard Martin, the current Director of Education and Public Programmes at the Whitechapel last week.
What has become apparent to me through these connections is how much the values, methods, aims and desired outcomes of the field of gallery education were shaped by the work of these and other pioneering practitioners working at that time. Reading the tributes to Sue written by colleagues who collaborated with her and hearing Jenni talk about her Whitechapel programmes, I have been struck by the significance of the following themes. In my mind, these are still fundamental to gallery education practice today.
The centrality of artists and artists practice
Both Sue and Jenni worked closely with artists as educators in the gallery and beyond. They recognised that artists brought an approach to teaching and learning that was informed by their own artistic practices. These artists foregrounded processes of thinking and learning through making that sought to bring learners closer to the art on show. Feeling comfortable with open-ended exploration, the artists allowed learners to engage creatively and collaboratively with the art and each other.
Situating the gallery as a place of exchange
For Sue and Jenni, the gallery was a meeting point. It was not only a place where visitors came into contact with art, but was also the space where the visitor could share their knowledge and creativity with gallery staff and with others. Hence, the pedagogic methods they adopted were fundamentally collaborative. The emphasis was on co-construction and shared learning, through dialogue. On a programmatic level too the priority was to take the art out into the local community as well as invite that community to come to the gallery. Artist-led outreach programmes were as important as in-gallery workshops.
Celebrating experimentation and cross-disciplinary ways of working
The language of ‘innovation’, ‘fluidity’ and ‘boundary-crossing’ cropped up regularly in the tributes to Sue and in Jenni’s talk. Both practitioners advocated for cross-disciplinarity and worked, not only with visual artists, but also with performance practitioners and musicians. In the 1980s gallery education was an emerging field, not bound by disciplinary conventions. This allowed for considerable experimentation and creative risk-taking; both making and ‘unravelling’ established ways of thinking, as Richard Martin observed when talking to Jenni.
Recognising the importance of praxis
My own memory of Sue is of an extremely generous and thoughtful colleague who was fully committed to establishing gallery education as a legitimate and valuable field of creative teaching and learning. She knew, as others did at that time, that for this to happen, gallery education needed to have a strong theoretical underpinning and recognisable good practice. For all the focus on experimentation and permeability, the practice that Jenni, Sue and others developed was extremely rigorous and care-full. Their methods were informed by concepts drawn from critical pedagogy, feminism, anti-racism and cultural theory. They were aspiring to bring about change – in learners, in the gallery, and in the wider community. Gallery education for them was never about colouring in worksheets, or transmitting the pre-determined expertise of gallery professionals and art historians. It was, and hopefully remains, a much more radical undertaking, providing an intellectual, emotional and creative space for questioning, re-thinking and re-making.
I was delighted to hear that Jenni is writing a book about the education programme at the Whitechapel. Gallery education’s history is woefully under-documented and the brilliant work that colleagues undertook from the mid-70s onwards is very patchily recorded. This is perhaps because gallery education by definition emphasises innovation and engagement with the present. However, I also believe that it is salutary and important to engage with the history of the practice and acknowledge the work of these pioneering educators. There is much to learn from what they did and how they did it.