Education Programme

Public Lecture Course

1 July 2017–30 June 2018

The Paul Mellon Centre began offering a series of lectures called the Public Lecture Course to members of the public in 2015. The aim of the series is to bring members of the public who have little to no background in British art history, into the Paul Mellon Centre. As part of this objective, the Public Lecture Course is completely free of charge, making it a unique opportunity for anyone with an interest in continuing their learning. The series is also broadcast and recorded every week, allowing people outside London and the United Kingdom access to the lectures. The recordings are freely available on the Paul Mellon Centre website.

In autumn 2017, the Centre offered a course titled Britain, South Asia: Entangled Histories. This series, which tied into “London, Asia” – the Centre’s ongoing collaborative project with Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong – looked at the ways in which the histories of Britain and Asia are irrevocably entangled through the lens of the shared artistic and visual cultures of both. The series was led by Sarah Victoria Turner and Hammad Nasar, who co-lead the “London, Asia” project, and featured lectures by Sandra Kemp, Rosie Dias and artists Said Adrus, David Alesworth and Sophie Ernst.

Due to popular demand, the Centre added an additional Public Lecture Course in spring 2018 and will continue to offer two courses on different subjects each academic year. The spring 2018 course was titled Thinking About Exhibitions: Interpretation, Reconstruction and Curation. This series, developed as a result of the Centre’s work on the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy, focused on the considerations that arise out of proposing, researching and putting on an exhibition. The series focused on three exhibitions held at major institutions: Hogarth (2006–2007) at Musée du Louvre, Paris, Tate Britain, London and Caixa Forum, Barcelona; The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition (2018) at the Royal Academy, London; and George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field (2018–2019) at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut and the Holburne Museum, Bath. This series was led by Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre, Mark Hallett, and featured contributions from curators Christine Riding and Sarah Victoria Turner and the artist George Shaw.

Educational Networks: Doctoral Researchers Network (DRN)

In spring 2017, the Paul Mellon Centre announced the creation of the Doctoral Researchers Network to sit alongside its existing Early Career Researchers Network. The network offers members the opportunity to connect with other current PhD researchers/candidates in order to create a community in which they can support and learn from one another. The Centre offers the network, space and resources to be able to host events that specifically focus on sharing information and learning new skills. The network is convened by two current PhD candidates and is overseen by the Education Programme Manager. The convenors for 2017–2018 were Tessa Kilgarriff and Emily Knight. The Doctoral Researchers Network’s first programme of events, which formally launched in autumn 2017 and spanned the 2017–2018 academic year, included “Approaching Public Engagement”, a panel discussion with Alice Purkiss (University of Oxford) and Danielle Thom (Museum of London) on their experience and the benefit of public engagement to their research; and “Digital Projects”, a workshop on how to create and contribute to digital projects, with speakers who included the Centre’s Digital Manager, Tom Scutt, and Hazel Wilkinson (University of Cambridge).

Educational Networks: Early Career Researchers (ECR) network

The Paul Mellon Centre continues to support the Early Career Researchers network that launched in 2015. Initially, the Centre’s Editorial Assistant Postdoctoral Fellow Hana Leaper convened and oversaw the network with Sophie Hatchwell. Both departed as convenors in May 2018 and, as a result, the Early Career Researchers network has now been brought in-house to be overseen by the Centre’s Education Programme Manager. The network continues to operate as before and is convened by two early career researchers.

Write on Art

In response to the decline in the teaching of art and art history in British schools, as well as the successful campaign to save the Art History A-Level, which was nearly cancelled, the Paul Mellon Centre partnered with Art UK to launch “Write on Art” in autumn 2017. Write on Art is a prize that highlights the importance of art history as an academic discipline, as well as the broader benefits of sharing ideas about art through good writing. The prize is aimed at school pupuls studying in the UK aged fifteen to eighteen. It asks students to pick a work of art from the Art UK website that fascinates them and try to persuade the reader to share their interest. The prize winner receives a £500 cash prize and their winning essay is published on the Paul Mellon Centre’s and Art UK’s respective websites. During the first round of the Write on Art prize, we received 195 submissions in total, with 45 submissions in the Year 10/11 category and 150 in the Year 12/13 category. The judging panel consisted of Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, Jackie Wullschlager, Chief Art Critic of the Financial Times, Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller, cultural historian and broadcaster Janina Ramirez, and David Dibosa, Course Leader for MA in Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Arts.

The winners of the 2017–2018 round were:

Year 12/13 category:

- First place: Catherine Jamieson, Esher College, who wrote about Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian

- Second place: Felicity MacKenzie, Godalming College, who wrote about Saint Francis in Meditation by Francisco de Zurbarán

Year 10/11 category:

- First place: Abhimanyu Gowda, King Edward VI School, Warwickshire, who wrote about British Empire Panel (11) India by Frank Brangwyn

- Second place: Sophie Mullins-Poole, Diocesan School for Girls, Grahamstown, South Africa, who wrote about George IV (1762–1830), when Prince of Wales (after Joshua Reynolds) by John Hoppner