Teaching
Venue
The New School is located in the heart of London's Bloomsbury, an epicentre for art, museums and the life of the mind. The host for our first two years was October Gallery, which includes an exhibition space, theatre, library, sculpture courtyard and café. At the end of 2024 we moved 100 yards north to Queen Square to the fully accessible Art Workers' Guild, founded in 1884 by a group of British painters, sculptors, architects and designers associated with the ideas of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement.
October Gallery has been instrumental in bringing to worldwide attention many of the world’s leading international artists, including El Anatsui, Rachid Koraïchi, Romuald Hazoumè, Nnenna Okore, Laila Shawa and Kenji Yoshida. The Gallery promotes the Transvangarde, the most innovative in contemporary art from around the planet, as well as maintaining a cultural hub in London for poets, writers, musicians, intellectuals and artists, and hosting talks, performances and seminars. The Gallery’s Education Department is inclusive of all ages from under 5’s to PGCE student for whom it delivers an innovative, wide-ranging arts programme.
From its foundation, the Art Workers' Guild promoted the 'unity of the all arts,' denying academic distinctions between fine and applied art. It moved into its incomparably elegant and welcoming Georgian building in 1914. The Guild today comprises 400 artists, craftsmen and designers with a common interest in the interaction, development and distribution of creative skills, and representing over 60 creative disciplines. Their charitable aim is to support the visual arts and crafts in any way that may be beneficial to the community.
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The New School continues to flex between locations and learning approaches (including digital) as individual projects demand. We are perhaps less a physical site, than a situation: a making (poein) by people engaged with each other and with ideas.
