KQ Private View: Slade 150

While we have to take a break from our in-person private views, we are working with curators to bring the KQ’s cultural offering to the digital realm! Join us at 3pm on Wednesday 9th March for an online experience brought to you by the UCL Slade School of Fine Art and UCL Culture.

This year, the Slade is celebrating 150 years of fine art teaching and research. From Stanley Spencer and Chila Kumari Burman to Rachel Whiteread and Michael Armitage, Slade School of Fine Art has educated and trained generations of world-renowned artists since 1871.

Curators, Staff and Students from the Slade will offer an exclusive virtual Private View for the Knowledge Quarter, showcasing their current artist-led exhibition SLADE 150: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE. Students on programmes from BA to PhD level, across all artistic disciplines, explore ideas of tradition and heritage, and ask how new generations can challenge and disrupt these.

The Private View will also showcase their parallel exhibition TESTING GROUND at the UCL Art Museum, and PRINT PALS: THEN AND NOW – a print collaboration between the Slade and the National College of the Arts (NCA) in Lahore, Pakistan.

About our speakers:

Nina Pearlman, PhD, is Head of UCL Art Collections at UCL. She works collaboratively at the intersection of research, curating, collecting, arts management, arts policy and innovation. She established Curating Equality at UCL, a virtual platform for projects with UCL Art Collections that employ a collaborative, interdisciplinary and poly-systems approach to gender equity in the arts and is a co-researcher on The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections, a multi-partner project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Towards a National Collection programme. Pearlman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, board member of Craftspace, and co-producer of the Women to Watch project for UK Friends of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.

Abi Ola is an MFA Fine Art 2021 graduate in the area of painting. She works with painting, collage, screen printing, photography and performance. Combining autobiographical and collective histories she takes inspiration from old family clothes, nature, and tribal art as well as African and Oceanic textiles. Through the original patterns that emerge she seeks to represent her West African heritage and her life in the UK. Ola intentionally obscures the identities of the figures in her work to allow the audience to place themselves or their loved ones within the images she creates. Ola is one of two 2021 UCL East student artists in residence.

Instagram - @abiolaartist & Twitter - @AbiOlaArtist

Lícia Santos is in the final year of her MFA in Fine Art in the area of painting. Her practice explores the body and nature through drawing, painting and performance, often drawing on her mixed Angolan and Portuguese heritage. Her work for Slade 150 engages for the first time with the practice of print, making etchings based on life observations of her peers at the Slade. She is interested in how spaces influence the creative process and how artists find refuge in these and consequently in each other. In 2020 she graduated from Goldsmiths College, was Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year series 7 and received the Slade’s Euan Uglow scholarship. In the year of her graduation from Goldsmiths College in 2020 she was recipient of the Slade’s 2020 Euan Uglow scholarship and participant in Sky Arts Portrait of the Year.

Instagram: @licia_santos

Korallia Stergides is in her final year of the MFA Fine Art in the area of media. She is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Cyprus working with performance, installation and media. Stergides interweaves autobiographical narrative into her work that explores the vital politics of care in an interdependent world and emphasises nonhuman agencies. Moments of public gestures of care toward nonhumans imprinted in public spaces and buildings hold particular interest. Her work for Slade 150 introduces for the first time object making alongside drawing and sound, and takes as its focus the stray cat that transitions between its role as domestic and public ‘pet.

Instagram: @aillarok

About Slade School of Fine Art at UCL

Since its foundation in 1871, following a bequest to UCL from Felix Slade, the School has been a leader in fine art education, fostering innovative, interdisciplinary artistic and art research cultures. Its multiple histories have transformed art education, research, and practice, both in the past and present, nationally and internationally.