Event
The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins towards Creative Emancipation
A major five-chapter exhibition and event programme creatively re-imagining and co-constituting radical blueprints for a socially transformative art education
Thursday 25 February 2021 - Wednesday 31 December 2025

Cooper Gallery
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design,
13 Perth Road,
Dundee,
DD1 4HT
About The Ignorant Art School
Bringing together artists, designers, educators, activists, cultural workers, students and community groups The Ignorant Art School questions what art education is and whom it serves. Enthused with revolutionary solidarity and organised as a collaborating collective The Ignorant Art School creatively re-imagine and co-constitutes radical blueprints 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 underscored by an economy of solidarity.
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
Programme so far

12 Hour Acting Up
12 Hour event
1 February 2025, 11am – 11pm (in-person)


Sit-in #4
Outside the Circle
Exhibition Preview & Collective Performance
17 October 2024, 5.30–8.30pm
Exhibition
18 October 2024 – 1 February 2025
Sit-in Curriculum #4
18 October 2024 – 1 February 2025 (online and in-person)

Image: The Ignorant Art School: Sit-in #4 | Outside the Circle
Installation view, photo by Sally Jubb

Sit-in #3 | The Otolith Group
...But There Are New Suns
Exhibition Preview
12 October 2023, 6–9pm
Exhibition
13 October – 16 December 2023
Sit-in Curriculum #3
12 October – 16 December (online and in-person)

Image: The Otolith Group, What the Owl Knows, 2022
Installation view, photo by Sally Jubb

12 Hour Sit-in Revel
12 Hour event
25 June 2022, 11am – 11pm (in-person)
Held at University of Dundee Botanic Garden

Image: Ashanti Harris with Mele Broomes, An Archive: The Rehearsal, 2022 (performance view)

Sit-in #2
To Be Potential
Exhibition
3 December 2021 – 19 February 2022
Sit-in Curriculum #2
3 December 2021 – 19 February 2022
Tour to Hatton Gallery
19 March – 21 May 2022


Images:
GUDSKUL, case study for The Ignorant Art School: Sit-in #2 | To Be Potential, installation view Cooper Gallery.
The Ignorant Art School: Sit-in #2 | To Be Potential, exhibition view Hatton Gallery Newcastle.

Sit-in #1 | Ruth Ewan
We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be and It's Not Too Late to Change
Launch Event
A History Class: An A-Z of Dundonian Dissent
25 February 2021 (online) 7.30–9.30pm
Sit-in Curriculum #1
Spring Term: 25 February - 24 April 2021 (online)
Exhibition
3 September – 23 October 2021
Sit-in Curriculum #1
Autumn Term: 3 September - 23 October 2021 (in-person and online)

Image: Ruth Ewan, How Many Flowers Make the Spring?, 2021
Installation including soil, moss, living and dried plants, grasses and weeds, five channel audio installation, 18 mins
Funding support
The Ignorant Art School at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and Henry Moore Foundation.

Cooper Gallery
[email protected]