a place of learning on the road

A van stocked with art materials and 42 full-scale fabric reproductions of paintings by the likes of Holbein, Canaletto and Titian will spend the next nine months zooming around the UK, emblazoned with the words “Art Road Trip”. This is the National Gallery’s travelling art studio, scheduled to deliver 200 creative learning workshops—one for each of the gallery’s years of history—to 40,000 children and adults in community venues from Northern Ireland to Aberdeenshire, Sunderland to Great Yarmouth, Blackpool to Wrexham.

Art Road Trip is “an amazing opportunity for us to make the connection between the collection and people’s lives,” says Anna Murray, the gallery’s national partnerships programmer. The gallery has collaborated closely with local grassroots organisations to design hands-on activities for each location, which are aimed at audiences who “might not know what the National Gallery is, or they might think it’s not for them,” she says. A research report commissioned in 2022 helped to identify the areas with the greatest need.

At each stop along the route, the gallery’s artist-educators will run ten days of community events in local schools, colleges and community centres, but “there’s no one set formula,” Murray says. “It’s different with every single partner.”

The trip kicked off 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” for a small local charity to partner 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 away from Belfast, and deprivation is high.

When Greater Shantallow put out an open call for organisations and schools in its network to host the National Gallery, “we were inundated,” Green says. The final roster of Derry events included a primary school assembly, a family day at the Guildhall museum and crafting sessions with older groups. “We wanted to make sure this was going to be cross-community.” The painting reproductions found new lives as “day loans” hanging up in school classrooms, as table covers and, during one memorable session at the Waterside Theatre, a Canaletto-lined den, Murray says.

“Bloody brilliant” was one participant’s verdict on a gel printing workshop, while the Derry-based artist Tommy Long, who paints in oil, describes how the Art Road Trip “has influenced me … to produce new and larger pieces of work and have the confidence to know that good work transcends the generations.”

One of the most inspiring messages, particularly for younger participants, was “realising that the arts can travel beyond any shores,” Green says. “I believe you will find the greatest artists in the funniest places and they won’t all be sitting in Trafalgar Square.”

The van’s final pitstop is planned for May 2025, coinciding with the close of the National Gallery’s year-long bicentenary celebrations, but the various community partnerships are only at the beginning, Murray says. The warm welcome in Derry felt like “a real germination of something,” she says. “I don’t know what that something is. But I think that’s the really nice part about it.”