Community: Unlocking creativity with our local schoolchildren
July 17 2014AL_A have run the second year of The Architects’ Club with Robert Blair Primary School in association with The Art Room.
Following on from last year’s after school Club focusing on The City, this year looked at Belonging, continuing the real concern for exploring what brings us together. The five-week Club helped to kick start Art Year at the School, looking at ideas of identity and community, culminating in a large-scale model of a proposed Brewery Road.
The Club was started with the ambition of creating a lasting social impact by direct engagement with our local community and its children who are experiencing emotional and behavioural difficulties. By taking them out of their environment for a new kind of creative learning experience in the studio and at the V&A, we raised their aspirations, giving the kids confidence and a sense of self-worth – and we learnt as much as the children.
We are now pitching the scheme to our clients to adopt within their companies and have high ambitions for it to flourish nationally.
Earlier in June this year, AL_A contributed a Clock Kit to ‘face time’, an exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London in aid of The Art Room, who support the Architects’ Club.
The Art Room, a charity who work with children to raise their self-esteem, self-confidence and independence through the means of art, approached artists to paint a clock face for a week-long exhibition to raise funds for the cause.