The Art Workers’ Guild is a unique body of more than 400 artists, craftspeople, architects, and academics working at the highest levels of excellence in their professions. We represent over 60 creative disciplines, including sculptors, architects, textile artists, potters, graphic designers, glass engravers, jewellers, furniture makers and printers. It is a place where traditional skills meet modern design and method, where creative connections are forged, and the work of the hand and ‘learning by doing’ are celebrated.
The Art Workers’ Guild is a registered charity that advances education in all the visual arts and crafts by means of lectures, meetings, demonstrations, and discussions. It fosters and maintains high standards of design and craftsmanship in all branches of the visual arts and crafts, in any way which may be beneficial to the community.
The Guild owns the freehold to and is housed in a centrally located, Grade ll* listed, 18th century London town house. To the rear is a meeting hall seating 100. Besides hosting the Guild's own lectures and events, the hall and other rooms are made available for the meetings of some 70 other arts-based bodies, so that it is estimated that between 25 - 30,000 people use the building every year to attend events, educational lectures and study groups on the visual and decorative arts and crafts.
The Guild holds fortnightly events - lectures, meetings, demonstrations, and discussions - which bring together, on an equal footing, practitioners in many different fields, and where members share their work, their vision, and their knowledge. In addition to fostering a community amongst its members, the Guild reaches out to other like-minded organisations to build links with their own members and to hold joint events and exhibitions.
The Guild runs a varied and wide-ranging Outreach programme of practical workshops, exhibitions, demonstrations, collaborative projects, and discussions. The programme brings the diverse skills of our members to a broad range of people including students, educators and academics, policy makers, medical professionals, scientists and engineers, families, young people, and refugees. We hope that everyone who participates gains an insight into the many ways in which craftsmanship and making nurture creative thinking, and how these can play an important role in everyone's life.
Useful Parallels
Useful Parallels comprises a day of cross disciplinary workshops, demonstrations and discussions for creative arts students, academics, and refugees, led by our members. Designed to open up ideas and skills, participants engage with makers, handling tools and materials, and having a go, as well as hearing how they have developed their work and their thinking, and how they make their living.
Creative Connections
Creative Connections is a year-long programme for creative people who are beginning to establish themselves professionally. Besides connecting with Guild members, participants are given the opportunity to build supportive networks among themselves and to develop the skills needed for a successful professional practice. Workshops, talks and discussions provide opportunities to share insights and ideas and to navigate the challenges of sustaining a career.
Schools project
We have built partnerships with Primary Schools in Newham and Winchester, in which Guild members run craft sessions for children. The aim is to help the children develop their motor skills, introduce them and their families to the ways in which children can express their innate creativity, to the idea that careers in the arts are viable options for their futures, and to help with their general social and emotional development.
Other Recent Activities:
- Participation in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Craft.
- Collaboration with community textile group East London Textile Arts, in the form of exhibitions and discussion events.
- Participation in London Craft Week and Open House.
- Tabletop Museums, where exhibitors show a very wide range of craftman-made objects.
- 3-day conference with a group of international computer programmers, the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG).
- 1 day seminar for makers of marionettes and puppets, identified as an endangered craft by the Heritage Craft Association.
Table Top Museums
We are asking for funding to help us expand our resources and reach, and are looking to raise an initial total of £50,000. This will greatly enhance our ability to fulfil our charitable purpose of advancing education in the visual arts and crafts.
For more information, please contact the Guild Secretary, Leigh Milsom Fowler. leigh@artworkersguild.org
Clay College, Crafts Council, Chase group - art history MA and PhD (Courtauld), East London Textile Arts, Foundling Museum, Grizedale Arts, Headway East (charity supporting those affected by brain injury), Heritage Crafts Association, Imperial College London, Kings College London, London Craft Week, London Design Week, London School of Architecture Museum of English Rural Life, October Gallery, PPIG (The Psychology of Programming Interest Group), Princes Foundation, QEST (Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust), Royal College of Art, University of the Arts London, University College London, University of the Creative Arts, V&A Research Institute, Watts gallery, Wellcome Institute
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