The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins towards Creative Emancipation

Sit-in #1: Ruth Ewan - We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be and It’s Not Too Late to Change

Sit-in Curriculum #1: 25 February–24 April 2021 (online)

Launch Event | A History Class: An A-Z of Dundonian Dissent:Thu 25 February, 7.30–9.00pm

Questioning what art education is and whom it serves, The Ignorant Art School brings together artists, designers, educators, activists, culture workers, students and other publics, to creatively re-imagine and co-constitute a collaborative and decolonised blueprint for a socially transformative art education that opens towards an emancipated future.

The title of the project is inspired by French thinker Jacques Rancière’s seminal book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in which Rancière recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiled French schoolteacher who in 1818 formulated a teaching method that dissolved hierarchies in conventional pedagogical practice.

Repurposing equality as a practice rather than an ideal, The Ignorant Art School examines the histories and future possibilities of art education. Directed towards a revolutionary and creative emancipation The Ignorant Art School celebrates feminist and social activist bell hooks’ declaration of “education as the practice of freedom”* by building communities of resistance and care.

Composed as five ‘Sit-ins’ The Ignorant Art School adopts the activist tactic of occupying institutional space as a critical and creative attitude and praxis to transform the Cooper Gallery into a laboratory for radical, ethical and accessible pedagogies for the many.

To embed and heighten the plural voices and ethos of distributed agency at the heart of The Ignorant Art School, an Associate Occupier will be commissioned for each Sit-in. Devised to be part agitator, part raconteur the Associate Occupier will respond, reflect and contribute to the Sit-in exhibition and Curriculum, actively developing and testing a ‘Blueprint’ for The Ignorant Art School. 

At the heart of The Ignorant Art School is a Sit-in Curriculum, a packed timetable of actions, workshops and gatherings facilitated by artists, designers, activists, and culture workers. Rejecting inequalities of access by deploying anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist methodologies, the Sit-in Curriculum is a space of collaborative and revolutionised learning open to all.

*bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994