Opening up art at the Whitechapel Gallery

Associated media

Seihee Shon reports on an Education Open Evening at the popular East London gallery

On the last Thursday of May, around 50 teachers, gallery educators, community workers and people interested in gallery education gathered at the Whitechapel gallery in East London. This is traditionally one of the less privileged parts of the capital, home to a variety of immigrant communities as well as working-class families who have lived there for generations. A room at the top of the gallery was ready to welcome all coming through the door to join the Education Open Evening event. And many did, in spite of bad weather conditions – it was a very windy and rainy evening. People sat in groups or on their own in the room, casually talking to each other. Many of them would have come to the event to network and, as the gallery is aware of this, 20 minutes were allotted for it. The carefully structured event consisted of three main parts: introduction to the education programme, a curator-led talk on the current exhibition, and two experiential workshops related to exhibition programme.

As the programme moved to an introduction to the gallery’s education programmes, curators and educators looking after each of programmes began to line up to speak about what they do and how to get involved.

The Whitechapel runs a variety of educational programmes in conjunction with the schools and communities in its neighbourhood, as providing access to learning is one of its stated objectives. For me, enthusiastic engagement with the neighbourhood community is one of the remarkable features of the Whitechapel gallery. For example, artists taking part in the gallery’s residency programme work in and with local schools, generating interaction with students as well as carrying out diverse collaborative projects. The current project ‘Reclaim the Mural’ suggests rethinking the value of murals and researching murals in your community. If you send a photo and details of murals that you have found, you may see your discovery in the mural map that the gallery is preparing. To focus attention on murals that have been mapped in the course of the project, the gallery has a plan to develop a mural tour for the public. Duchamp and Sons is a project for young people aged from 14 to 24 based in nearby Tower Hamlets. The newly named project for the younger generation is in collaboration with curators, artists and other arts professionals with diverse expertise.

The most impressive part of the evening was listening to a short speech by a representative from Duchamp and Sons about what she has experienced through the gallery programme and how it has affected her vision for the future. This young woman’s long-standing relationship with the programme has given her a strong desire to work in the art world. At the moment she is working as trainee at the gallery. The emphasis of her talk, based on her own experience, was on the importance of the educational role of the gallery. This resonated with teachers and educators present, compelling them to learn more about enhancing the educative value of experience in galleries, schools, communities and so on.  

After a tour of the Paul Graham exhibition by curator Kirsty Ogg, two optional sessions were offered. A workshop led by artist Marysa Dowling concentrated on the Paul Graham exhibition, using the educational resources recently developed. I joined the other workshop, a meditative activity by Duchamp and Sons, and enjoyed a relaxing and immersive experience.

The Whitechapel has been running the Education Open Evening four times a year since 2009. Since then, this informative and engaging event has been operating as a place for creating and maintaining networks between people in the sector, allowing them to develop productive collaborations and share ideas. For the gallery, this two-hour event serves as an excellent means of advertising its latest programme and communicating with an audience who are willing to involve themselves actively in gallery education. The event provided me with a chance to rethink issues and questions of the gallery’s role in the community, broadly speaking in our society, and encouraged me to pursue a personal observation of art gallery education. It is a big question and certainly not simple to answer. So I would not attempt to seek a single definitive answer. Instead, I plan to explore different approaches to gallery education as a means of communicating with a variety of audiences and communities according to each gallery’s particular neighbourhood.