Sat 17 Nov 2018 - Sun 10 Mar 2019
Our 2018 Autumn season focused on the changing nature of artistic education. We were delighted to present a solo exhibition by Scarborough based artist Jade Montserrat, who had also been in residence with us during 2018.
Montserrat works at the intersection of art and activism through drawing, painting, performance, film, installation, sculpture, print and text. She developed a new public commission with Art on the Underground, London which launched in Autumn 2018, and was the Stuart Hall Foundation practice-based PhD candidate at The Institute for Black Atlantic Research, The University of Central Lancashire.
At Bluecoat, the artist transformed the gallery walls with huge charcoal wall drawings as part of a wider installation. The drawings were comprised of quotations and responses to key texts on decolonisation and decolonising knowledge by writers such as Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde and Stuart Hall. Montserrat’s drawings featured fragments of text by local and international artists addressing vital questions such as "who does art education serve and who should it serve?", "How do we value individual and collective creativity?" and "What could a care centred approach to education look like?"
As part of Bluecoat’s wider season which asked ‘who gets to be an artist?’, Montserrat opened these questions out further with events and workshops in the gallery space, including a reading group by artist Jack Tan, a radical mycology gathering led by Jane Lawson and life-drawing with artist and model Paul Kindersley.
