Curriculum explores the intersection of contemporary artistic practice and school education in the 21st century.
Curriculum surveys a broad range of practices that share an interest in how the conventions of learning, as typically encountered in schools, might be extended or reimagined. At the heart of Curriculum is Art School, an independent curatorial framework founded by Jennie Guy in 2014. Operating throughout Ireland, Art School establishes interfaces between contemporary art and schools as sites of education, inviting students and artists to work collaboratively. It takes place as a series of workshops, residencies, exhibitions and new writing that explore how contemporary artists can intervene within systems of education in order to inspire and expand, fracture and revise.
Curriculum comprises essays in which skilled Irish and international writers engage with the work of the artists who took part in Art School. Each contribution provides a lens revealing specific moments within the evolution of Art School, working outwards to explore how these moments resonate with the wider fields of art-in-education and radical pedagogies. These texts respond to a widespread concern with art and its place in education, while retaining a committed and informed engagement with the phenomena they assess.
Relatively little critical attention is given to the role played by art in primary and secondary level school education except in rather instrumental or broad terms. This book and the practices it contains are presented as interventions. Instead of being pegged against national objectives or recycling existing pedagogic theory, the book charts vivid acts of imagination premised on real projects that have taken place through Art School between 2014 and 2020.
Responding to a growing desire to rethink art education at all levels, it is for those committed to new forms of social imagination and social engagement in contemporary art. This book is for curators, school teachers and other educators, and also for artists and art students who wish to extend their practice beyond the gallery.
Less a manifesto or a declaration of doctrine than an emergent set of experiments, Curriculum considers the school as a zone of artistic and curatorial practice, foregrounding the potential of contemporary art (understood in wide terms) to stimulate students’ creativity in original and open ways.
With contributions by Clare Butcher, Gerard Byrne, Juan Canela, Helen Carey, Daniela Cascella, Jennie Guy, Andrew Hunt, Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed, Alissa Kleist, Rowan Lear, Peter Maybury, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Nathan O’Donnell, Sofia Olascoaga & Priscila Fernandes, Matt Packer and Sjoerd Westbroek.
Curriculum explores projects by artists Sven Anderson, John Beattie, Sarah Browne, Karl Burke, Rhona Byrne, Ella de Búrca, Vanessa Donoso Lopez, Priscila Fernandes, Hannah Fitz, Jane Fogarty, Kevin Gaffney, Adam Gibney, Fiona Hallinan, Elaine Leader, Maria McKinney, Mark O’Kelly, Sarah Pierce and Naomi Sex.