Five Decades: Photographs from Coventry School of Art and Design
Lanchester Research Gallery
The exhibition Five Decades: Photographs from Coventry School of Art and Design (2018) attempted to capture a the viewpoints of several different students and lecturers that attended or taught during the first five decades of being in the Graham Sutherland Building (Originally known as M Block and now known as the Delia Derbyshire Building).
The exhibition offered a mixture of photography, documents and interviews with staff and students. The photographs from the sixties shows individual student artworks, and the degree shows for 1967-1969 which where held at the Herbert Museum & Art Gallery. The seventies photography show an emergence of student engagement in performance, and photographs from the legendary Coventry Events Week, which became an international arts festival that continued into the Eighties. In the imagery from the Eighties there is an increasing emphasis on student photographs of partying, studio spaces, living spaces and demonstrating. The eighties photography also shows the development of the Canal Basin Trust, which was a new studio that was created by lecturers and students from the school. Images also includes images from 1987 of the Computer Graphics course at Coventry. The nineteen nineties images show a students using new technologies in the studios, alongside the start of the annual degree show catalogue. The recent photographs show students working in their studio spaces, degree show preparations and school trips abroad.
The exhibition captured a small snapshot of activity, the collection of photography was sourced from surviving students and staff of the Fine Art Department at the Graham Sutherland building.
Fun Factory: Coventry Faculty of Art & Design in the 1980s
Classroom Gallery
The exhibition takes its title from a nickname for Coventry School of Art & Design’s Graham Sutherland Building. The photographs in our new exhibition were all taken by Alan Van Wijgerden, he first attended Coventry School of Art & Design (Lanchester Faculty of Art & Design) in the 1980 to study electronics. Since this point he has been recording Coventry and its people. He found himself in his spare time drawn towards the activities and people on the fine art course.
He began unintentionally documenting the Fine Art course and the lives of the students who were undertaking their studies. As a result, many of the images in this exhibition were taken in and around the Graham Sutherland Building. The images he produced act as a record of the kinds of art and activities that were ongoing at the building, students can be seen in their studios or hanging out together in front of the building.
Van Wijerden was ‘unstoppable’ with his camera, he captures the homes of students, and they give a gritty and vivid picture of what a fine art student’s home looked like in the 1980s. In some of the photographs it becomes clear that some students that he met during his studies roughed it in simple make shift tents or squatting.
The images show a group of students that were politically motivated, and conscious of the effects of the rationalisation of arts education on their own educations. Van Wijerden attended several different marches and protests, either as an observer or as an active participant. In the images that will be on show images on show there are marches for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a selection of students protesting cuts that were being imposed on the Lanchester Polytechnic.
