Cooper Gallery
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee
3 December 2021 – 19 February 2022

Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University
5 March – 21 May 2022

This exhibition and event project navigates and extends experiments in art education and alternative educational initiatives from the early 20th century to the present.

One of several featured projects, ‘The White Room’ experiment, was instigated by artist and tutor Rita Donagh with a group of students at the Fine Art Department at Reading University in May 1970. At the centre of the experiment was a consideration of the figure of the life model, and a question of what could happen in a ‘life room’ at a time when art education was subject to radical changes.

The White Room/Drawing Life (1970), a series of collage works from ‘The White Room’ by Anne Bean, together with reconstructed elements and ephemera, is accompanied by a newly commissioned audio work The Ballad of the White Room by Anne Bean, Graham Challifour, Rita Donagh and Rod Melvin.