Digital Editions
Newsletters
Subscribe
Digital Editions
Newsletters
Art market
Museums & heritage
Exhibitions
Books
Podcasts
Columns
Technology
Adventures with Van Gogh
Art market
Museums & heritage
Exhibitions
Books
Podcasts
Columns
Technology
Adventures with Van Gogh
National Gallery London's 200th anniversary
feature

The National Gallery: a place of learning on the road

With workshops, crafting sessions and special events, Art Road Trip is collaborating with communities across the UK to produce inspired results

In partnership with
The National Gallery
Hannah McGivern
15 August 2024
Share
The Art Road Trip van arrives in Derry for its two-week journey with Greater Shantallow Community Arts Courtesy of Greater Shantallow Community Arts, Derry

The Art Road Trip van arrives in Derry for its two-week journey with Greater Shantallow Community Arts Courtesy of Greater Shantallow Community Arts, Derry

A van stocked with art materials and 42 full-scale fabric reproductions of paintings by the likes of Holbein, Canaletto and Titian will spend the next nine months zooming around the UK, emblazoned with the words “Art Road Trip”. This is the National Gallery’s travelling art studio, scheduled to deliver 200 creative learning workshops—one for each of the gallery’s years of history—to 40,000 children and adults in community venues from Northern Ireland to Aberdeenshire, Sunderland to Great Yarmouth, Blackpool to Wrexham.

Art Road Trip is “an amazing opportunity for us to make the connection between the collection and people’s lives,” says Anna Murray, the gallery’s national partnerships programmer. The gallery has collaborated closely with local grassroots organisations to design hands-on activities for each location, which are aimed at audiences who “might not know what the National Gallery is, or they might think it’s not for them,” she says. A research report commissioned in 2022 helped to identify the areas with the greatest need.

At each stop along the route, the gallery’s artist-educators will run ten days of community events in local schools, colleges and community centres, but “there’s no one set formula,” Murray says. “It’s different with every single partner.”

The trip kicked off in May in and around Derry in Northern Ireland. Greater Shantallow Community Arts has been active there for 25 years, and it was “a very big deal” for a small local charity to partner with the National Gallery, says its artistic director, Oliver Green. “Derry has a wonderful and talented creative arts sector,” he says, but “it can be very isolated,” some 70 miles away from Belfast, and deprivation is high.

A fabric image of Juan de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons in a Wicker Basket (1643-49) is the starting point for talks and creativity Courtesy of Greater Shantallow Community Arts, Derry

When Greater Shantallow put out an open call for organisations and schools in its network to host the National Gallery, “we were inundated,” Green says. The final roster of Derry events included a primary school assembly, a family day at the Guildhall museum and crafting sessions with older groups. “We wanted to make sure this was going to be cross-community.” The painting reproductions found new lives as “day loans” hanging up in school classrooms, as table covers and, during one memorable session at the Waterside Theatre, a Canaletto-lined den, Murray says.

“Bloody brilliant” was one participant’s verdict on a gel printing workshop, while the Derry-based artist Tommy Long, who paints in oil, describes how the Art Road Trip “has influenced me ... to produce new and larger pieces of work and have the confidence to know that good work transcends the generations.”

One of the most inspiring messages, particularly for younger participants, was “realising that the arts can travel beyond any shores,” Green says. “I believe you will find the greatest artists in the funniest places and they won’t all be sitting in Trafalgar Square.”

The van’s final pitstop is planned for May 2025, coinciding with the close of the National Gallery’s year-long bicentenary celebrations, but the various community partnerships are only at the beginning, Murray says. The warm welcome in Derry felt like “a real germination of something,” she says. “I don’t know what that something is. But I think that's the really nice part about it.”

National Gallery London's 200th anniversaryNational GalleryArt educationNorthern Ireland
Share
Subscribe to The Art Newspaper’s digital newsletter for your daily digest of essential news, views and analysis from the international art world delivered directly to your inbox.
Newsletter sign-up
Information
About
Contact
Cookie policy
Data protection
Privacy policy
Frequently Asked Questions
Subscription T&Cs
Terms and conditions
Advertise
Sister Papers
Sponsorship policy
Follow us
Instagram
Bluesky
LinkedIn
Facebook
TikTok
YouTube
© The Art Newspaper

Related content

Essential artworksfeature
30 June 2025

Ten essential works of art to see at the National Gallery in London

The art historian Matthew Holman makes a personal selection from the finest collection of its type—celebrated for the breadth and depth of the story it tells of Western painting up to 1900

Matthew Holman
Visitor Figures 2020feature
29 March 2021

Can museums really make digital visits pay?

As venues experiment with selling virtual exhibition tours, talks and workshops online, the key to success may be an emphasis on the expert, bespoke and exclusive

Hannah McGivern
Art on Locationnews
2 August 2024

The Constable trail: National Gallery to focus on the social, political and artistic context of the artist's 'The Hay Wain'

Visitors on foot to Dedham Vale, in Suffolk, can view the remarkably well preserved locations of John Constable's paintings of the countryside in which he was nurtured

Gareth Harris
National Gallery London's 200th anniversaryfeature
12 August 2024

'What is the museum of the future?' The National Gallery's forward-looking digital strategy

Experimentation, freedom and in-house content are key to how the gallery engages with its five million followers on social media

George Nelson
In partnership with The National Gallery