Abstract:

Art Higher Education institutions over a number of years across the United Kingdom have had the most vocal and active campaigns led by both students and staff to decolonising the curriculum. At the centre of this has been the recognition that there are systematic disparities in final awarding gaps for students of colour even though they have had qualifications equal to or higher than their white British students when entering the arts higher education institution.

There is an outcry even from a number of white students that there is a hierarchy of knowledge which gives systematic prominence to artists and art practices from white North American and white European backgrounds further highlights the damage to art education that this is caused to creative practices. This is deepened further by an absence of both staff and students of colour in both employment and learning environments of arts higher education institutions.

Most art institutions hierarchy and management have grudgingly been forced to acknowledge these issues after re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white Police officer in May 2020. However, the mechanics of making systematic change are ground down by an application of existing dominant mode of pedagogic practices and philosophies.

Juxtaposed, and surrounded and encompassing this need for change, are the dominant political fault lines of race and racism in any discussion of artistic and cultural practices surrounding creativity in higher education. Not only in the UK and the US but also across Europe the never-ending imagined ‘threat’ by outsiders who have different cultural and art practices are intertwined with ‘our sophisticated culture and art’ been pushed aside and or ‘cancelled’.

This paper will provide a cultural context of research, negotiating with concepts of understanding omitted histories and making histories, in use of zines in art pedagogical practice, to bring about an agency of change by both students and staff in art institutions to ameliorate disparities of institutional discrimination in student outcomes and access to arts education.

Keywords:

Art, Culture, Anti-racism, Black Lives Matter, Higher Education, Knowledge systems, pedagogy, zines.