January 9, 2017 at 12:15AM

Anyone who has ever wondered what art students get up to all day can find out this week as Tate Modern plays host to a temporary school to which anyone can enrol.

The This Is An Art School project has been created by students, staff and alumni of Central Saint Martins on the fifth floor of Tate Modern’s new extension.

It is the inaugural event for the Tate Exchange Associates programme, formally launched on Monday. Fifty-three associates from Touretteshero – which celebrates the creativity and humour of Tourette syndrome – to the Open University, are taking part in the programme.

The art school project takes place every day until 16 January and will highlight what Saint Martins believes is “a systematic assault on arts education in the UK”.

Alex Schady, a programme leader at the college, said art was increasingly being isolated in the school timetable and creativity dismissed as peripheral.

“We want to think about what forces are currently impinging on arts education and what resistance we can, all of us, offer to that,” he said.

Visitors who enrol at the school can take part in workshops, seminars and lectures along with the students and staff. There are more than 100 lesson plans and zones that could see people suddenly involved in a performance workshop or a life-drawing lesson.

Organisers stressed they were not saying everybody should be an art student or artist “but that everyone should experience the arts”.

That is the central thrust of the wider programme, which would focus on widening the possibilities of collaboration and participatory art, said Tate.

The projects and events will tackle subjects including migration, homelessness, identity and mental health, with the public invited to test ideas or consider new perspectives.

The Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, said Tate Exchange was a long-term commitment to develop “new ways of reaching audiences, new ways of collaborating”, representing a change in the way the organisation thought about its relationship with its audiences.

from Education | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2j06DE6
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