New display celebrates The Hepworth Wakefield's School Prints initiative
11 Jul 2024
A new display has gone up in The Hepworth Wakefield stairwell to celebrate School Prints.
School Prints is inspired by a ground-breaking scheme set up in the 1940s by Brenda Rawnsley. She encouraged artists, including Henri Matisse, Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso to create lithographic prints specifically for schools, to give children direct access to high-quality art.
The Hepworth Wakefield revived the scheme in 2018, and for the fifth edition of School Prints invited three artists with long-standing relationships with the gallery to produce new prints – Phyllida Barlow, Veronica Ryan and Ro Robertson. All were given Brenda’s original brief: ‘I only ask that you create something suitable for children’.
This year, The Hepworth Wakefield has worked with four local primary schools – Featherstone All Saints CofE Academy, North Featherstone Junior and Infant School, Streethouse Primary School and St Thomas’ CE Junior School to deliver a programme of workshops, gallery visits and teacher professional development workshops to support their explorations of contemporary art. The engagement project was delivered by artist Rachel Sim.
The project culminated in a series of celebratory exhibitions of pupils’ artwork where a set of the School Prints artworks were donated to each of the schools, to be displayed in school permanently.
A selection of the pupils’ artwork, inspired by the School Prints this year can been seen in the new stairwell exhibition at the gallery.
Bea Wright, Schools Programmer, The Hepworth Wakefield, said:
‘I am delighted to see a selection of pupil’s artwork from this year’s School Prints project celebrated in our new stairwell exhibition. The donation of contemporary art to schools in our local Wakefield community and our engagement project with the schools is hugely impactful for the pupils, many of whom have never been to a gallery before. To see their creativity and work celebrated and on display in the gallery is hugely inspiring for them.’
The Hepworth Wakefield is open daily during the Wakefield school holidays and is FREE for Members, Wakefield District residents and under 18s.
