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An exhibiton of women’s artwork being produced now, and influenced by Feminism in the 1980’s. Exhibiton selected by Sutapa Biswas, Sarah Edge and Claire Slattery. This show toured from Cooper Gallery, Barnsley. Part of Anne Frank in the World Programme.

Curated by Joshua Lockwood-Moran

Please note this is a rescheduled event that is now streaming online only.

Coinciding with The Art Schools of the East Midlands exhibition, join us for a free event that explores the role of British art schools in shaping fashion, music and club culture over the last 40-50 years.

We will be joined by esteemed writer and curator Paul Gorman, who will discuss his work’s engagement with the significant role played by art schools, their educators and attendees in the broader culture.

Join us as we explore this past and consider it against the wider influence of the notion of the ‘art school’ on other forms of cultural and creative production.

Photo of Paul Gorman by Toby Amies.

We are delighted to welcome Birmingham based artist-educator Shannon Thomson for a ‘micro-residency’ during John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands. Shannon will explore Nottingham School of Art & Design’s architectural, social and cultural history through the process of personal and collective collage making.

For two days, Shannon will be working within the gallery, cutting and splicing source material from our archive with photography and ephemera gathered by the artist herself.

Visitors to the gallery will be welcome to join in with the activity and create their own collages, contributing to a collective dialogue about the subject of art school pasts, presents and futures.

Shannon will return to the gallery on Saturday 25th November, 10 am – 1 pm for a session with our Saturday Art Club group. Visitors to the gallery that day will be able to observe this activity taking place inside the gallery.

Launch event: Friday 15 March, 6–8 pm. Book free tickets

Don’t miss the first UK exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Osheen Siva, entitled ‘Karuppu’ (கருப்பு – meaning darkness/black in Tamil). The exhibition includes drawings and paintings, collaborative tapestries crafted with local woman artisans, and the incorporation of leather, laden with political and caste contexts in India.

Originally from Thiruvannamalai in South India, and currently based in Goa, Siva is an acclaimed artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, performance and public art. As a digital illustrator they have collaborated with leading global brands including Apple, Gucci, and Meta.

Taking a cue from Afrofuturism, Siva’s work brings together science fiction, mythology, heritage, their love of comic books, and the vibrant, joyful colours of South India to create fantastical characters and dreamscapes, reclaiming and reinventing Indian folktales and myths to imagine a decolonised future.

Siva’s work is rooted in their Dalit and Tamil heritage. Dalit translates as ‘broken, divided, split, shattered’ and Dalits are among India’s most marginalised citizens, condemned to the lowest echelons of society by a rigid caste hierarchy. Karuppu – meaning darkness or black in Tamil – carries associations with ‘evil’ in Hindu mythology and is often used in reference to the lower caste and the ‘untouchables’. Siva navigates the complexities of Dalit history, offering a powerful and evocative exploration of identity, resistance, and the quest for a liberated future.

A self-taught illustrator and muralist from Thiruvannamalai, India, Osheen Siva imagines a brave new world of decolonized dreamscapes and narratives of queer power

– BlackStar

Siva’s Dalit Futurism reclaims the word Karuppu, seeking to invert and transform the arbitrary structure of caste through a narrative of mutation and hybridity. The beautiful mutant characters serve as a metaphor, challenging assigned social status and established histories with non-binary fluidity, championing bodily autonomy, and highlighting queer and feminine power.

Central to the exhibition is the reclamation and reinvention of Indian mythologies. Siva’s work critiques Hindu scriptures and ancient Sanskrit texts that perpetuate the discrimination of lower-caste individuals. Deliberately countering the lack of positive imagery associated with Dalit communities, Siva creates progressive depictions, envisioning a future that transcends existing stereotypes.

Exploring their heritage in the farming communities of Tamil Nadu, nature is a recurring motif in Siva’s work. Acting as a dual symbol, the natural world conveys fruitfulness and abundance and also highlights the trauma associated with labour and bondage, creating a complex dialogue between nature and social hierarchy.

Images by Osheen Siva, 2024.

Artist website: https://osheensiva.com/
It’s Nice That: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/osheen-siva-illustration-140721
Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/810814/coasting-the-topography-of-south-asian-futurisms/

With audio description and creative captions

history is a living weapon in yr hand is a solo exhibition of new and reconfigured work by London-based artist Onyeka Igwe.

The exhibition will be centred around a new two-screen adaptation of Igwe’s dual timeline experimental film A Radical Duet (2023). The film imagines what happened when two women of different generations, but both part of the post-war independence movement, came together in London to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play. The film depicts this process, and envisages what that play would look like, if staged today.

1947 London was a hub of radical anti-colonial activity. International intellectuals, artists, and activists like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, and George Padmore were all in London at the eve of the end of British colonialism. Individually, they were agitating for their respective countries’ national independence, but did they meet? And if they all did, what did they discuss? What did they conjure?

The film will be accompanied by elements of the set design and props from the making of A Radical Duet, taking inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s ideas on theatrical adaptation. Wynter builds on Brechtian principles of modern epic theatre and advises on how set design can support a theatre to ‘explode [social] fears by bringing them out into the light of day’.

For this exhibition, Igwe will be working with Collective Text, an organisation supporting accessibility in art and film through creative captioning, audio description and interpretation.

A Radical Duet was commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through FILM LONDON Artists’ Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England.

history is a living weapon in yr hand is produced in collaboration with Peer Gallery, London, where it will be presented in autumn 2024.

Photographs by Jules Lister

Join us for an insightful gallery tour of our current exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, and the accompanying exhibition, Art [School] Histories in the Vitrines and foyer.

Find out how the exhibitions emerged as part of the Art School Project and uncover stories behind the work and its connections to Nottingham.

• Free, open to all
• Booking is required
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55pm for a prompt start
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery

Book your free place now

• Book now for Wednesday 8 November, 1 – 2 pm

Join Bonington Gallery’s Director Tom Godfrey for an insightful gallery tour of our current exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, and the accompanying exhibition, Art [School] Histories in the Vitrines and foyer.

Find out how the exhibitions emerged as part of the Art School Project and uncover stories behind the work and its connections to Nottingham.

• Free, open to all
• Booking is required
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55pm for a prompt start
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery

Book your free place now

• Book now for Tuesday 3 October, 1 – 2 pm

Did you study at Nottingham School of Art & Design? Or have you attended past events at Bonington Gallery? We’d love to hear from you!

We are collecting memories and photos to put on display in our next show, Art [School] Histories which will sit in our foyer and vitrines alongside our main gallery exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck and Matthew Cornford. We are interested in capturing and reflecting those informal moments – an exhibition or event you visited, life between lectures, studio time, trips, souvenirs, socialising with your peers, going to openings in Nottingham.

These could take the form of:

• photographs
• flyers
• posters
• ticket stubs
• typed up anecdotes/memories

How to submit your memories

Email your scans or hi-res photos to us boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk and we’ll print reproductions to add to our pinboard in the vitrines, in the gallery foyer. If you don’t have access to a scanner, then a clear photo taken on your phone will suffice. If you need our assistance in making a copy, or you have any queries about this invitation, then please email the address above.

Share on social media

You can also share them with us on Instagram or Facebook @boningtongallery by tagging us and using the hashtag #artschoolhistories so that we can re-share.

The exhibition starts on 21 September 2023, but we will be adding materials to the wall until the end of the exhibition on 2 December so feel free to contact us at any point between these dates. After the exhibition, the materials will be kept and added to an archive for the project.

By submitting your materials, the assumption is made that you are happy for their public display and retention in the exhibition archive. It might be that certain materials are used for promotional and publicity purposes by Bonington Gallery & Nottingham Trent University.

John Beck and Matthew Cornford
The Art Schools of the East Midlands
22 September – 2 December 2023
Exhibition preview: Thursday 21 September 6-8pm

This autumn Bonington Gallery presents The Art Schools of the East Midlands, the latest iteration of John Beck’s and Matthew Cornford’s ambitious Art School Project to locate and document the nation’s art school buildings or the sites upon which they once stood. The project combines photography, text, and archival materials to explore the histories and legacies of Britain’s art schools, and examine the vital role art schools have played, and continue to play, in the cultural and economic life of our towns and cities.

The twin Victorian engines of industrial ambition and social reform powered the British art school system, set up to deliver a skilled labour force for local industry – such as lace manufacture in Nottingham – and much needed educational opportunities to the newly enfranchised working class. Art schools combined practical training and exposure to culture, turning out skilled producers and discerning consumers well into the twentieth century.

By the mid-1960s there were still over 150 art schools in the UK, and ‘art school’ became a journalistic shorthand for creative innovation across arts, design, music and advertising. Yet at the peak of their influence on British cultural life, art schools in many towns and cities were already being amalgamated, reorganised and rebranded as part of a drive to reshape education in the arts. Most art schools have long since been absorbed into larger institutions or faded away.

Bonington Gallery’s presentation focuses on the art schools of the East Midlands and features original photographic images of all the region’s art school buildings alongside displays of archival material. The striking grandeur of Derby School of Art’s Gothic Revival building currently stands empty, whilst the Waverley Building built in 1865 for Nottingham School of Art remains one of the few Victorian built art school buildings still actively used for teaching art – as part of Nottingham Trent University. The project is also, importantly, an investigation of our present moment, documenting the sites of former art schools which have been redeveloped or reused.

The exhibition and the accompanying series of talks and events aim to create a space for dialogue and debate, raising questions about the role of the arts and art education in relation to community, history, and identity, and the shifting complex role of cultural production and cultural labour in the contemporary environment.

The Art School Project was prompted by the discovery that the college both Beck and Cornford attended in the early 1980s, Great Yarmouth College of Art and Design, was disused and up for sale. Evolving over 15 years the project takes the form of a series of regionally focused exhibitions. Their work on the West Midlands was recently shown at the New Gallery Walsall, and the North West iteration of the project was exhibited in Liverpool, Bury and Rochdale. The project is documented on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theartschoolproject/

Join us for a first look round a new photographic exhibition by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, focusing on the region’s art schools, and the vital role that they play in the cultural life of our cities.

Accompanying the exhibition, in our Vitrines you can discover archive materials and memories relating to the history of Nottingham School of Art & Design, established in 1843.

Book your free ticket now

• Free, all welcome.
• Free refreshments will be available from 6 pm – first come, first served!
• Enjoy a DJ set by Kay Fabe
• Photography will be taking place.
• There is lift and stairs access and an accessible toilet.