A van loaded with art materials and 42 life-size fabric reproductions of paintings by artists including Holbein, Canaletto and Titian will whizz around the UK for the next nine months bearing the words ‘Art Road Trip’. This is the National Gallery’s mobile art studio, which will deliver 200 creative learning workshops – one for each year of the gallery’s history – to 40,000 children and adults in public spaces from Northern Ireland to Aberdeenshire, Sunderland to Great Yarmouth, Blackpool to Wrexham.
Art Road Trip is “a great opportunity for us to make the connection between the collection and people’s lives,” says Anna Murray, the gallery’s national partnerships manager. The gallery has worked closely with local grassroots organisations to develop practical activities for each site, aimed at audiences who “may not know what the National Gallery is, or who think it’s not for them,” she says. A research report commissioned in 2022 helped identify the areas of greatest need.
At each stop along the route, the gallery’s artists and educators will hold 10 days of community events at local schools, colleges and community centers, but “there’s no set formula for this,” Murray says. “It’s different for every single partner.”
The journey began in May in and around Derry in Northern Ireland. Greater Shantallow Community Arts has been active there for 25 years, and it was “a very big deal” that a small local charity was working with the National Gallery, says its artistic director Oliver Green. “Derry has a wonderful and talented creative arts sector,” he says, but “it can be very isolated”, some 70 miles from Belfast, and deprivation is high.
A fabric picture by Juan de Zurbarán Still life with lemons in a wicker basket (1643-49) is the starting point for conversations and creativity Courtesy of Greater Shantallow Community Arts, Derry
When Greater Shantallow launched an open call for organisations and schools in its network to host the National Gallery, “we were inundated,” says Green. The final list of events in Derry included a primary school assembly, a family day at the Guildhall museum and craft sessions with older groups. “We wanted to make sure this would be cross-community.” The painting reproductions found new lives as “day loans” hung in school classrooms, as tablecloths and, during a memorable event at the Waterside Theatre, in a Canaletto-lined living room, says Murray.
“Bloody brilliant” was one participant’s verdict on a gel printing workshop, while Derry-based oil artist Tommy Long describes how the Art Road Trip “made me… create new and bigger works and gave me the confidence that good work lasts for generations.”
One of the most inspiring messages, especially for younger participants, was “the realisation that the arts can reach beyond all boundaries,” says Green. “I think you find the greatest artists in the strangest places and they’re not all in Trafalgar Square.”
The van’s final stop is planned for May 2025, to coincide with the conclusion of the National Gallery’s year-long bicentenary celebrations, but the various community partnerships are just getting started, Murray says. The warm welcome in Derry felt like “the budding of something,” she says. “I don’t know what that something is. But I think that’s the really beautiful thing about it.”
