We are The National Association for Fine Art Education, the Subject Association for Fine Art education in the UK. We advocate the interests, promotion and cultural relevance of Fine Art education at Foundation, BA, MA and PhD levels.
We are The National Association for Fine Art Education, the Subject Association for Fine Art education in the UK. We advocate the interests, promotion and cultural relevance of Fine Art education at Foundation, BA, MA and PhD levels.
Call For Contributions
Deadline: 3rd March 2025 / Confirmation: 17th March 2025
Culture Co-operative: Moments, Spaces, and Alternatives for Art and Cultures of Learning
National Association for Fine Art Education, Annual Conference @ Feral Art School, Hull
Friday 25th April 2025
The themes of this conference follow on from those of the 2024 NAFAE Conference: The Art of Resistance (UCA Canterbury), and the arguments of the recent book Cooperative Education, Politics, and Art: Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education (Hudson-Miles and Goodman eds 2024). Herein, educators from both mainstream and alternative art schools issued a variety of creative, political, and pedagogical challenges to the current neoliberal HE paradigm.
Art educators recognise that the arts are a force for creating engaged citizenship and civic agency. Beyond the conferment of diplomas, art schools embody this sociocultural engagement whilst also offering wider benefits to local wellbeing, regional innovation, community building, and urban regeneration (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016). Yet, incremental ‘financialisation, commodification, and marketisation’ (McGettigan 2013) of higher education has made art education into an increasingly corporate endeavour. Here, creativity, cultural value, and social justice cede to managerial realism and instrumental notions of value for money. This has made the political, artistic, and pedagogical critique of art schools more urgent. In various ways, protest has always been the substance of art education. The cooperative education projects and community-based alternative art schools, as discussed within Hudson-Miles and Goodman (2024) embody this critique, importantly including this year’s host venue, The Feral Art School.
This year’s conference looks at a culture of co-operation between mainstream and alternative art schools, and other partners, to consider what this looks like now and how it could be in the future. We are looking for conference contributions that address the moments, spaces, and alternatives for art and cultures of learning. By doing so the aim is to question and speculate on whether a counterhegemonic alliance between mainstream and alternative art schools is possible? If so, what would be the terms of reference? Or do the embedded corporatisation/marketing structures risk co-opting the language of subversion/refusal/critique (Punk/Guerilla Girls) and by extension bluewashing and greenwashing programme identities? What would be the key research questions? What policies would need reforming? What discourses need challenging? What foundations require deterritorializing (Deleuze and Guattari 1988)?
Our gathering at Feral Art School this year is a chance to unite initiatives and share stories of resilience, creativity, active critique and positive actions. Alongside proposals, the conference will include invited speakers: sociologist, historian and radical and co-operative education expert practitioner, Professor Cilla Ross and Alice Woodhouse: originator and co-ordinator of From the Foundations and creator of the Joe Woodhouse archive.
Points of focus for contributions:
Some issues that contributions might address are, but not limited to:
Moments:
· What are the persistent barriers to (HE) art education?
· Changes in learner attitudes caused by a ‘pedagogy of debt’ (Williams in Edu-Factory Collective 2009).
· Hidden inequalities in HE.
Spaces:
· Urban renewal through creative placemaking.
· The employability paradigm vis à vis modest graduate employability and widely reported skills deficits.
· The loss of the traditional art school identity.
· What spaces make for good art schools - future thinking.
Alternatives:
· What good practice is already happening between mainstream and alternative art schools?
· What is the ‘cultural value’ (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016) of art education - what ‘else’ does it offer?
· Connecting alternative and mainstream HE to industry.
· What is the future (alternative) art school?
Proposals:
Proposals should be no more than 500 words and should include your name, email address and organisation or situation, along with the title of the proposed presentation, paper or provocation. All proposals will be peer reviewed.
Proposals for contributions should be submitted to: admin@nafae.org.uk no later than Monday 3rd March 2025 , 23:59. The decision on contributions for our next NAFAE conference will be communicated to the participants by 17th March 2025.
To submit a proposal for contributions, you must be a NAFAE member. To join NAFAE please visit https://www.nafae.org.uk/membership
We look forward to meeting friends and allies at the Feral Art School on 25 April 2025.
In solidarity!
NAFAE Conference Committee: Jackie Goodman, Richard Hudson-Miles, Andrew Bracey, Catherine Maffioletti, Gabi Boiangiu, John Cussans, Jenny Warburton.
Annual Conference
The Art of Resistance
National Association for Fine Art Education, Annual Conference @ UCA Canterbury, Kent.
10:00-16:00 - Wednesday September 4th, 2024
The National Association for Fine Art Education invites you to our annual conference on The Art of Resistance. Tickets to the conference are free with membership.
The Art School is changing, has changed and will continue to change. The art school has an ability to be agile in reproducing itself in an expanding range of platforms, amongst social and political contexts and against sector metrics that challenge us to work in different ways. Within the University sector, the fabric of an Art School takes different forms, but the concept and attitude of the original ‘Art School’ still prevails. Meanwhile, instances of self-organisation and collective action, independent spaces for art making and exchange, and educational activism, are becoming an urgent necessity for enabling cultural inclusion. Increasingly, there are multiple cross-overs and prospects for local partnerships that are evolutionary and dynamic. There are numerous ways in which we have all learnt and are learning to make things happen in delivering a student experience which is inclusive through varied curriculums which are expansive and challenge the parameters of what we do.
There are characteristics present and common to each Art School scenario:
- Precarity, in the sense of vulnerability as we are all affected by factors beyond the immediate community of practice (and by an openly hostile political agenda)
- Defiant passion, a mission and ambition that is lived by people who won’t be deterred from what they understand to be critically important and valuable
- Innovation and creative ways of operating within structures and systems, often taking the form of alternative approaches
In the current climate, it would be tempting to focus our concerns onto the way that marketisation and the application of economic norms have effectively diminished the reliability of resourcing and the richness of the social offer at the heart of art education. However, in the final analysis, the true core of everything are the people who drive, inspire, make and enable.
- Artist activists and artists who teach,
- Educational activists and teachers who create,
- Maker activists and technical experts who share,
- Social activists and organisers who produce collective action.
Typically, such people are those who can’t ‘put it down’, who can find ways of adapting and ‘working with’, who can look forward, who carve out opportunities, who can challenge boundaries, who seek political agency for those they don’t know, and who find strength in the cultural richness that we can and should disseminate.
Our gathering at Canterbury, Kent will focus on innovative, disruptive and/ or alternative ecologies of practice that exist within and beyond the Art School. This year’s conference provides an opportunity to bridge initiatives and connect experiences, particularly those which point to visions for the future, resilience and resistance and positive action. Each in our community has a multitude of positive anecdotes, examples, and successes; stories that aren’t frequently told or, more likely, become obscured by the intensifying struggle to defend access to cultural and creative means.
Once again, the background to this conference are the urgencies and crisis’s that continue to challenge and destabilise UK post-statutory education in Fine Art:
‘Ministers will cut funding for performing and creative arts courses at English universities next year, …………. .’
Guardian report, 03 May, 2024
‘……44 institutions currently affected by redundancies. Stated job losses are around a thousand but many more are concealed behind non-specific announcements of “voluntary severance schemes.” ’
World Socialist Web Site, 02 April, 2024
However, in preparing for a future alternative, it is important to reflect on and take strength from what members across our community are already achieving with their students and learners. At our 2024 conference, and as a network, we are primarily interested in practice and projects; in how people are producing and how educators and fine art practitioners are responding to challenge.
To join NAFAE please visit https://www.nafae.org.uk/members
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Art of Resistance
National Association for Fine Art Education, Annual Conference @ UCA Canterbury, Kent.
Wednesday September 4th, 2024
Deadline: Monday 24 June, 2024.
Confirmation: Monday 8 July, 2024.
The Art School is changing, has changed and will continue to change. The art school has an ability to be agile in reproducing itself in an expanding range of platforms, amongst social and political contexts and against sector metrics that challenge us to work in different ways. Within the University sector, the fabric of an Art School takes different forms, but the concept and attitude of the original ‘Art School’ still prevails. Meanwhile, instances of self-organisation and collective action, independent spaces for art making and exchange, and educational activism, are becoming an urgent necessity for enabling cultural inclusion. Increasingly, there are multiple cross-overs and prospects for local partnerships that are evolutionary and dynamic. There are numerous ways in which we have all learnt and are learning to make things happen in delivering a student experience which is inclusive through varied curriculums which are expansive and challenge the parameters of what we do.
There are characteristics present and common to each Art School scenario:
- Precarity, in the sense of vulnerability as we are all affected by factors beyond the immediate community of practice (and by an openly hostile political agenda)
- Defiant passion, a mission and ambition that is lived by people who won’t be deterred from what they understand to be critically important and valuable
- Innovation and creative ways of operating within structures and systems, often taking the form of alternative approaches
In the current climate, it would be tempting to focus our concerns onto the way that marketisation and the application of economic norms have effectively diminished the reliability of resourcing and the richness of the social offer at the heart of art education. However, in the final analysis, the true core of everything are the people who drive, inspire, make and enable.
- Artist activists and artists who teach,
- Educational activists and teachers who create,
- Maker activists and technical experts who share,
- Social activists and organisers who produce collective action.
Typically, such people are those who can’t ‘put it down’, who can find ways of adapting and ‘working with’, who can look forward, who carve out opportunities, who can challenge boundaries, who seek political agency for those they don’t know, and who find strength in the cultural richness that we can and should disseminate.
Our gathering at Canterbury, Kent will focus on innovative, disruptive and/ or alternative ecologies of practice that exist within and beyond the Art School. This year’s conference provides an opportunity to bridge initiatives and connect experiences, particularly those which point to visions for the future, resilience and resistance and positive action. Each in our community has a multitude of positive anecdotes, examples, and successes; stories that aren’t frequently told or, more likely, become obscured by the intensifying struggle to defend access to cultural and creative means.
Once again, the background to this conference are the urgencies and crisis’s that continue to challenge and destabilise UK post-statutory education in Fine Art:
‘Ministers will cut funding for performing and creative arts courses at English universities next year, …………. .’
Guardian report, 03 May, 2024
‘……44 institutions currently affected by redundancies. Stated job losses are around a thousand but many more are concealed behind non-specific announcements of “voluntary severance schemes.” ’
World Socialist Web Site, 02 April, 2024
However, in preparing for a future alternative, it is important to reflect on and take strength from what members across our community are already achieving with their students and learners. At our 2024 conference, and as a network, we are primarily interested in practice and projects; in how people are producing and how educators and fine art practitioners are responding to challenge.
Proposals are invited for presentations, papers or provocations that respond to the broad theme of ‘The Art of Resistance’. The four key areas this theme aims to address are as follows (we are, however, open to other suggestions and responses not covered here):
Provocations for the ‘Art School of the 22nd Century’: Art School as attitude.
Art education and activism: Communities of Practice and collective agency; the value of self-organisation, mutual empowerment, friendship and solidarity.
Resistance as creative change: Disruption and radical practice; Hope labour, cultural activism and social contribution.
Practice exchange: The diversity of artist educator’s tacit intelligences, nurtured and stored in acts of creative making, shared as sources of wisdom and knowing.
Proposals should be no more than 500 words and should include your name, email address and organisation or situation, along with the title of the proposed presentation, paper or provocation. All proposals will be peer reviewed.
Proposals should be submitted to: admin@nafae.org.uk no later than Monday 24th June 2024.
Response to abstracts will be provided by 8th July.
To join NAFAE please visit https://www.nafae.org.uk/members
Essential not Optional: Celebrating the Creative Arts in Higher Education
Date: 26-27 June 2024 / Location: Lincoln Arts Centre, University of Lincoln
Sign up here: https://lincolnartscentre.co.uk/event/essential-not-optional/?
Essential not Optional: Celebrating the Creative Arts in Higher Education is an in-person conference that brings together members from DanceHE, DramaHE, MusicHE, and NAFAE for a series of interdisciplinary panels, debates, and keynotes. This conference is not merely a convergence of disciplines; it's a celebration of the essential role played by Drama, Music, Dance, and Art in higher education. This two-day conference is structured into four strands - ‘CREATIVE INDUSTRIES?,’ ‘COLLABORATION,’ ‘INCLUSIVITY’ and ‘HEALTH AND WELLBEING’ - that each act as provocations for what the creative arts do and can offer in the current Higher Education landscape.
Essential not Optional explores the synergies that arise and collective influence we might wield when these four disciplines come together. This unique gathering provides a platform to explore our collaborative potential, shared ethos, and the impact that Drama, Music, Dance, and Art has on the academic landscape of our institutions and the sector as a whole. The conference offers a rare opportunity to explore how these disciplines can work together to enhance and reinforce the position and influence of the creative arts. We hope that this collaborative conference will help us to foster a more resilient, cohesive, and interconnected network, not only between disciplines but with partners in compulsory education, community arts, industry and policy. By sharing insights, methodologies, and best practices from across our memberships, we can cross-pollinate ideas to shape the practices, policies, and cultures of learning that define our collective educational environments in the present and the future.
The conference is free to members of DanceHE, DramaHE, MusicHE, and NAFAE, to become a member please sign up via the appropriate association's website. Refreshments and lunch are provided.
https://www.dancehe.org/become-a-member
https://dramahe.ac.uk/members/
Contact: admin@musiche.ac.uk
https://www.nafae.org.uk/members
Secretary Report
Annual General Meeting 26th April 2024
2 Camels
I am calling this ‘report’ something like ‘between the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back and the story of the weeping camel’.
This is my way of trying to think where we are between ‘bordering on despair’ and ‘never losing hope’.
The current landscape for art and design education seems to many of us perhaps to be caught in a bit of a seismic shift even since a number of us met in the conference at The School of Mosaic in north west London in 15th September 2023…”Revisiting the Fine Art Graduate”.
We may not have imagined then the extent to which Universities in particular across the sector would have to go into various forms of ‘restructure’ mode. This may or may not be variously impacting upon Art and Design but ‘straws breaking backs’ may be where there has had to be a significant overhaul of academic staffing, where Schools may be asked to re-align differently within, or combine with other Schools and overhaul courses, so as to reduce costs…
But………..now let me talk about the story of the ‘weeping camel’…a beautiful lyrical film about a Mongolian nomadic tribe in the Gobi desert…one of their camel’s gives birth to a calf , a rare white calf, that she then seems to reject…the nomad family and especially the young boy as I recall is doing all he can to get the mother to accept the calf and give it succour…first the tribe call in the ‘lama’-a Buddhist monk offering spiritual guidance …but...no matter how much chanting …it seems not to work…
But then later…a violin playing traveller appears…( a particular type of Mongolian violin called the morin khuur or ‘horsehead fiddle’)…the wonderful sounds of this violin fill the sky…the mother of the boy in the tribe starts to share in the rhythm and the tone of the violin’s sound…and…after a while…
The mother camel unbelievably starts to weep…and upon weeping turns to her calf and gives it succour…
See….art saves and finds life…art saves art…and gives meaning to work…so we must not give up…and we didn’t give up at the School of Mosaic.
That conference in a wonderful and distinctive local setting produced a conference that was global in its reach. Its ideas were practical, aspirational and inspirational. What struck me about that conference was the strong sense we gave to the variety of exciting and innovative and unconventional ways in which art answers to all the call for ‘employability’ but also called back to all that we had said about ways of thinking ‘community’ in Birmingham the year before …and it was about art and life in the call for us to remember Joe Woodhouse and Foundation Press and the plan for the event at Newcastle Contemporary Art next year…the conference was all about what art Gives…and does not ‘take away’…
This was also the introduction to and opportunity for some of us coming to together in the webinar/conversation about the politics of ‘alternative art education’ in support of Richard Hudson- Miles and Jackie Goodman’s book…what a great happening that was…who knew we would generate such thoughtful and provoking ideas.
Many of us may be thinking more and more about our links and togetherness with all forms of art education and furthering these to inform us ‘beyond’ the contexts of Higher Education…this I hope give us strength to face the coming challenges and NAFAE is very valuable indeed, especially I think, in terms of its openness and the welcome given to such a wide reaching community….
We may feel like weeping but we still nourish each other.
To be scholarly, I end with a quote from a book by Hannah Proctor*…’ it is possible to mourn and organise at once, and do both without compromise…
So yes, let’s keep organising around the positivity of art and its spaces and places for cultural sustainability and nourishment…
*Proctor H (2024) ‘Burnout-the emotional experience of political defeat’…London Verso Books 2024
Jenny Walden Secretary NAFAE