Schools Of Art

A photographic survey of UK schools of art by artist Matthew Cornford and writer John Beck. Contemporary colour photographs of these often architecturally significant buildings are accompanied by captions detailing each art school’s history. Cumulatively they reveal the changes undergone by many of these vital institutions and offer a reflection on the state of art education today. Artist Matthew Cornford and writer John Beck studied at art school in Great Yarmouth in the early 1980s. Three decades later they found the building boarded up and for sale. Was the closure of this art school of simply local significance, they wondered, or part of a broader story about the changing place of art and art education in the country? Combining fieldwork and archival digging, over the last ten years the pair have explored the towns and cities of the United Kingdom, building a photographic record of each art school building, or the site upon which it stood, and compiling a capsule history of each institution. Cumulatively, the images are a reminder of quite how many art schools there were in the UK, with over 150 still in operation as recently as the 1960s. As contemporary photographs, the images also speak to a complex and varied history of amalgamations, closures, renovations, demolitions and shifting priorities in art education and beyond. Schools Of Art is a selection of 75 photographs and captions from Beck and Cornford’s ongoing survey, covering the celebrated and the forgotten, the repurposed and the dismantled institutions that fuelled and shaped the creative life of the UK for over a hundred and fifty years. Among the questions raised by this work are fundamental ones regarding the value and significance of arts education and its contribution to the health and prosperity of our towns and cities.

About the Author :
John Beck is a writer and a professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Westminster. He has published extensively on aspects of British and American literature, art and visual culture. Matthew Cornford is an artist and professor of Fine Art at the University of Brighton. Between 1991and 2014, he collaborated with David Cross, as Cornford & Cross, on a range of art projects in the UK, Europe and the USA. Beck and Cornford have been working together on the history and legacies of British art schools since 2010. Their collaborative art and research project has produced a range of publications and printed matter, public art, lectures and talks. The core of the project is an ongoing series of regionally-focused exhibitions of original photographs and accompanying text. Their work on the art schools of the North West was exhibited at Liverpool Bluecoat (2018), Bury Art Gallery (2019) and Rochdale Touchstones (2022). The rich art school landscape of the Midlands was explored in different iterations at the New Art Gallery Walsall (2023), Bonington, Nottingham (2023), Martin Hall Gallery, Loughbourgh University (2024) and at Leicester Gallery, De Montfort University (2025). 'The Art Schools of Yorkshire' opens at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University in 2026. Barry Miles is the critically acclaimed author of numerous biographies and cultural histories of the Beat Generation, the Beatles, and the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. Among his biographical studies are major books on Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Frank Zappa and Paul McCartney, among others. London Calling (2009) explores the vitality of the capital's art and countercultural scene from the end of the Second World War through to the end of the century, and In the Sixties (2002) covers Miles's own art school experiences in Stroud and Cheltenham.