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Our exhibition is free, fun and super creative! Click on the link below to view our exhibition: 

STEAM – online exhibition

Who are the Young Curators?

We are a group of 14-19-year old’s who are all passionate about art and creativity and we have all been brought together by three amazing artists: Amanda, Nicola and Robyn, for this we are immensely grateful. Not only have they helped us improve our art, but we have grown as people. For example, we have all taken part in public speaking, press releases, poster designing (with the help of Snootie studios) and coordinating our exhibitions -this being our second one. We meet for two hours weekly however due to government guidelines we are meeting via video call, and I believe we all have a very good relationship with one another and always offer each other support. As a team we are always working with artists and currently we are all working towards our silver arts award. It’s amazing how far as a group we have come so in our journey together and our bond has grown really strong. As a group, we believe that it is a shame that the majority of our community are not aware of the Young Curators and who we are as we have a lot to offer.

 

What does STEAM stand for? 

STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths, we have chosen this theme for the exhibition as 2020 is the year of science and creativity across Essex. Where organisations, schools, and members of our society are encouraged to embrace and participate in activities/events revolving around STEAM. After attending the STEAM drop-in sessions at the Phoenix Live Lounge, the Young Curators began to feel very passionately towards holding our own exhibition, the event was eye-opening and sparked many ideas amongst our group. We were honoured to be given the opportunity to speak at the event and we all learnt so much about STEAM curriculums and aspects of it all.

Why is it an online exhibition?

Due to social distancing advice given by the government, sadly we are unable to showcase our STEAM exhibition at Gatehouse Arts. However, as a team we have pulled together and we are proud to say that we have been able to make the most out of things. We felt that we could use the internet to our advantage as it meant we could make callouts to larger numbers and (hopefully) get our community involved in something incredibly positive during these tough times. To do this we created all the publicity work ourselves to search for submissions and build an interest in the online exhibition such as: creating posters, contacting schools, Instagram posts and emailing members of our community. We made sure that we kept in contact with one another via video call so that we could evenly distribute jobs in manageable proportions as most of us also have school work to be getting on with, but we were keen to make sure the event would still go ahead. After researching how other galleries are dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, it was clear to us that one professional way for us to move forwards would be to somehow transfer it online, which we have now done.

What is the aim of the exhibition? 

Due to the fact our exhibition is now online, many of our aims have changed. One that strongly remains is that we would like to spark an interest and understanding of STEAM amongst students as many primary/secondary schools only have STEM curriculum, excluding art. As a group we discussed what art means to not only us but our community as a whole, and it is truly a big sector of our day to day lives especially as Harlow is a sculpture town, and it truly shows as almost anywhere you go in the town there are sculptures nearby.  Many careers also have strong links to art such as: Architecture, interior design, photographers, tattooists, advertisers and set designers. Other careers are also linked to art such as: Product designers, hair colourists, fashion designers and nail technicians. In our opinion it is really important that we show students that Art is just as important as other subjects they may study at school, and in a way, this exhibition is a way of us demonstrating how important art really is. Another goal of ours is to pull our community together and allow everyone to take a minute away from homeschooling/working from home to appreciate how members of our community have contributed towards something very positive during these tough times.

The Young Curators

Email: contact@youngcurators.com

Instagram: youngcurators2020

 

 

Lockdown hasn’t stopped the Young Curators! The young people are preparing an online exhibition and still working towards their Silver Arts Award.

Watch this space…

What kinds of things do we see when we look at art? What happens when we look for longer? When we curate, what connections do we want to invite our audience to make? The teams looked at works in the collection to practice analysing, interpreting and sharing opinions.

Next it was time to apply those skills to a curation challenge: could the teams select artworks which would work well together? What characteristics would they choose to look for?

How would they help their audience see connections between the works?

And how would they display the works in a given space?

The teams worked really well together, solving problems, presenting their work to the other groups, and giving constructive feedback. A great start to the course.

We had an excellent time interviewing young people for the 2019-20 Young Curators programme. Every young person we met was full of creativity- we really wished we could select everybody. We also met with some of Harlow’s fantastic art teachers and careers staff, and the excellent team at Rainbow Services, all of whom helped us recruit our new team.

Week 1 is always about getting to know each other. Our first icebreaker created a web of connections: how many interests do we share?

We also ask each person to choose a work from the collection and two words to capture how they are feeling- it’s always interesting to compare with two new words at the end of the project.

 

 

We are looking for young people to join the Young Curators programme in the new term. Are you aged 13- 19? Would you like to meet other young people with creative interests, work with artists and creative professionals,  and develop ambitious exhibitions in professional venues? Would you like to gain Silver Arts Award, a Level 2 qualification (equivalent to GCSE level) by collecting evidence of the activities you do?

We welcome young people from all backgrounds, and taking part in the programme is free of charge. Please help us spread the word!

The Young Curators’ Illusion exhibition is still on display at The Gibberd Gallery. For further details, check out the Exhibition page.

Everything is nearly ready, just a final flurry of activity….

Can you spot: name badges, poster, notes for speech, clicker for counting visitors, exhibition labels, activity for visitors to engage with…

 

Along side the planning and preparation for the exhibition, we took the opportunity to try out ideas in the gallery space, and practice some practical curation skills with a 15 minute team ‘picture challenge’:

Meanwhile, there was an opportunity to catch up on some of the evidence collecting for Silver Arts Award.

After much deliberation and a brainstorming session, we managed to land on “Illusions” for our next exhibition. We’ve started to prepare for it, and we’ve had the privilege of attending a printing workshop at Parndon Mill so we could make some work of our own for the exhibition.

We’ve split up the tasks and started working on them already, and we’ll have the exhibition done for it’s opening on the 21st of May.