School Prints from The Hepworth Wakefield

Natalie Bradbury

Natalie Bradbury runs us through the fourth edition of School Prints – The Hepworth Wakefield’s five-year project to engage every primary school child in the Wakefield District with contemporary art – which this year places a new focus on supporting the teaching of Black histories across the curriculum in local schools. The 2021 artist cohort includes Hurvin Anderson, Alvaro Barrington, Sir Frank Bowling, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, and Yinka Shonibare.

In the 1940s, Brenda Rawnsley, a campaigner for the arts and education, came up with a novel idea: commissioning contemporary artists to design prints which could be reproduced in large quantities and sold cheaply in large numbers to schools.  

More than 70 years later, The Hepworth Wakefield has revived the idea. Since starting in 2018, the gallery has commissioned six artists on an annual basis to make new prints to be distributed to the city of Wakefield’s schools and sold to the public as limited editions. Released in March, this year’s cohort are part of a project to support the teaching of Black histories in schools. The prints do this through a variety of forms, using inventive approaches to traditional, timeworn genres such as landscape, still life and portraiture.

The original ‘School Prints’ had multiple aspirations. At a time when many children had been traumatised by wartime upheaval and experiences such as bombing and evacuation, they were comforting and familiar, depicting scenes such as fairgrounds and farmyards. At the same time, the ‘School Prints’ were indicative of modernity, signalling a change in the ambience, environment and nature of education. Forming part of a wider movement to bring art to people in their everyday environments, they also fulfilled a range of functions, both overt and latent, from making children accustomed to ‘high’ art and ‘good’ culture, to trying to influence the uses of their leisure time. Artworks were used in schools to improve children’s skills of looking, analysis and interpretation, and even to influence their future consumer purchases. Art was also seen as having therapeutic qualities and helping children’s emotional development – something that was regarded as being as important for future citizens as their academic achievements.

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, children’s lives and education have again undergone unprecedented levels of disruption, and both schools and cultural institutions have spent the past year adapting to remote ways of working. In spring 2021, as students finally begin to return to the classroom after several months of home schooling, it’s impossible not to view these pictures through the prism of our times: today’s ‘School Prints’ are simultaneously timeless and make us aware of the times we live in. 

The contemporary ‘School Prints’ convey a range of messages that vary according to the individual experiences of the viewer, from their social status and place in the world, to the age of the child looking them. Some prints invite the viewer to identify with the role of the artist and to remember their own experiences of making art. Younger children might see themselves reflected in Child Painting (2020) by Claudette Johnson, a portrait which shows Johnson’s grandchild painting. Depicted in line and wash, they are crouched close to the floor, captured in the act of creativity. After several years of educational reforms which have seen the arts side-lined in schools, the picture can also be read as a comment on the value of creative exploration: the child is active, alert and engaged.

Sir Frank Bowling’s Benjamin Run (2020) similarly foregrounds freedom and experimentation and encourages the viewer to imagine the act of creation. It shows what happens when the artist is free to follow the properties of materials and test the possibilities of their imagination. The bright, abstract colours of the print bring to mind techniques such as marbling; it was made in collaboration with Bowling’s son, the titular Benjamin, who was invited to drop pots of primary coloured paint onto the centre of the page.  

Vivid pinks, yellows and greens give an immediate appeal to the print Mum’s (2020) by Hurvin Anderson. Exotic flowers, interspersed with leaves, dance across a bright blue background, while occasional snatches of a grid suggest a garden trellis or the corner of a checked tablecloth, indicating a still-life or a landscape in the watercolour medium. The print is deeply humdrum and rooted in the domestic, resembling the repeated floral patterns of wallpaper or home furnishings – or a summer’s frock, saved for best. Mum’s references Anderson’s family history: the son of a Jamaican immigrant, who settled in Birmingham upon arrival in the UK, the print draws on different types of wallpaper encountered as the artist’s mother set up home, made places her own, and forged a sense of belonging in a new country. 

Other pictures invite children to see their own lives as the basis for art. Grandma’s Hands (2020) by Alvaro Barrington depicts a pair of roughly drawn hands with their knuckles clenched. Isolating one body feature, the hands are removed from a figure, backstory or context, yet suggest shared experiences such as prayer, hope and aspiration for the future, as well as a sense of solidarity and familial connection through generations. Seen in 2021, the print gains an added poignancy, highlighting touch and togetherness: many people have lost these due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, which prevented travel and visits to the homes of friends and family. 

Aristocrat in Blue (2020) by Yinka Shonibare is the most tactile of the current ‘School Prints’, incorporating elements of original collage. The presence of Dutch wax-printed batik pattern – one of Shonibare’s trademark materials – is a material reminder of the riches generated in countries such as Britain and the Netherlands through the international textile trade. Aristocrat in Blue is also more overtly didactic than the other contemporary ‘School Prints’. Resembling an entry in an illustrated alphabet, it challenges the notion that definitions are fixed or immutable. In Aristocrat in Blue, Shonibare has created a cultural hybrid by substituting a West African mask from Mali – with gaps for the eyes and mouth – for the formal likenesses usually depicted in stiffly posed aristocratic portraits in Western art. In doing this, Shonibare disrupts conventional portrayals of the European ruling classes and ostentatious depictions of wealth. Aristocrat in Blue highlights the ways in which status, power, breeding and privilege are encoded, perpetuated and communicated through customs and traditions such as dress and deportment – and prompts us to make a mental connection between visible markers of wealth and concealed histories of exploitation elsewhere in the world. 

Perhaps the most effective of this year’s ‘School Prints’ is Lubaina Himid’s Pop Art-esque BIRSONG HELD US TOGETHER (2020). The message contained in the print’s title is spelt out in lettering reminiscent of letters cut from newspaper headlines. Placed collage-style on a patterned backdrop, the words form a frame around found and decorative images of birds and plants. As Himid observes, on a superficial level, the pandemic may have encouraged people to pay closer attention to their local environments: the first national lockdown led to less traffic, quieter towns and cities and an increased volume of birdsong. However, the pandemic has also laid bare deep social inequalities between rich and poor, from access to space and privacy, to jobs which can be done from home, to possession of the technology, time, resources and knowledge necessary to home school, to the availability of green space and health care, to vaccine take-up; ethnic minority populations have been disproportionately affected. Himid’s print underscores one of the key lessons of the pandemic: the notion that we are all in it together is a dangerous illusion of which we must all remain acutely aware. 

Find out more about ‘School Prints 2021’ at www.hepworthwakefield.org/news/six-new-school-prints-for-2021/.