Scholars Spotlight Arts Education With Exhibition 

Operating in both formal and informal contexts across the African continent, their research is critically informed and grounded in historical analysis, particularly with respect to Africa’s colonial heritage. After opening on Saturday, 12 August 2023, the exhibition will remain on display until March 2024. 

ARAC is a cluster of Another Roadmap School, which is a self-organised network of practitioners and researchers of artistic and cultural education based in over twenty-four cities on four continents worldwide. ARAC’s working groups are based in African cities and are currently active in Kampala, Nyanza, Lubumbashi, Kinshasa, Maseru, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Cairo. The cluster’s aim is to build a shared knowledge base and a structure of mutual learning that will benefit African practitioners and contribute to advances in thinking and practice worldwide. 

For the Javett-UP’s iteration, ARAC primarily focuses on the Schoolbook Project, which aims to enhance access to the work that the group has done, and the knowledge it has produced since 2015. These include PROVOCATIONS, a collection of the questions and provocations in arts education; EXERCISES which systematise the methodologies they have developed; and GLOSSARY, a compilation of glossaries of indigenous African words that are used to describe concepts unlike but akin to European concepts of art, artist, aesthetics, design, and education. 

ARAC’s presentation forms part of Javett-UP’s 2023 program which invests emphasis on Pan-African artistic education in partnership with both local and continental platforms and forums, bridging the knowledge divide through hybrid channels. The Javett-UP is an exceptional art centre that enhances learning through transdisciplinary journeys in the arts. It engages diverse publics through creativity, in exploring the human condition, and re-imagining futures.