We’re taking art and creativity on the road, across the UK.
From May 2024 to May 2025, our travelling art studio programme, Art Road Trip, is visiting 18 places across the UK.
We’re going to be working with 24 local arts organisations to create community-led arts projects. In each location, we’re designing events for people with the least access to creative opportunities and the arts.
Over the year, our mobile art studio will host around two hundred public events and work with thousands of people to bring art and ideas inspired by the National Gallery Collection right to where they live.
Where is the Art Road Trip now?
Deveron Projects 20 ‒ 31 August 2024
On Tuesday, 20 August, Art Road Trip reaches northeast Scotland. This is our seventh stop and marks the road trip’s furthest point - 518 miles— from the Gallery in Trafalgar Square, where we join our partner Deveron Projects.
Deveron Projects, based in the town of Huntly, Aberdeenshire, is a socially-engaged arts organisation. They build meaningful collaboration between artists, communities and places through the process of making art. The Art Road Trip programme was developed in collaboration with Deveron Projects and artist-in-residence Natasha Ruwona to explore ideas connecting land and landscape.
Events over the course of two weeks invite residents of Huntly and the surrounding areas to participate in a series of walks by Natasha Ruwona and Fi Thomson, a town-wide exhibition of 150 artworks created by schoolchildren, creative workshops and critical events that will build connections between the Gallery's collections and Huntly, as it is now and what it might be like in the future.
During our stay Art Road Trip will take over Square Deal community hub for drop-in creative activities, which include collage, drawing, painting, projection and collaborative installations as well as a changing-daily exhibition of life-size fabric replicas from the collection. We have special workshops planned for local groups and schools including after-school drop-ins, as well as family friendly drop-in activities and workshops exploring materials and techniques in the collection. A vibrant talks programme includes conversations with a local history enthusiast and a local farmer and miller, exploring the links with John Constable’s 'The Cornfield'.
Deveron Projects has invited local groups and organisations to collaborate on special Art Road Trip events, sharing music, books, walks, discussions, and more with the Tin Hut Sessions, Huntly Youth Group, Artists’ Social, Huntly Queer Book Club and Deveron Projects’ regular Friday Lunch. For more information about the programme and our partners Deveron Projects, visit their website.