Art and language

Taking its cue from the Tate Britain collection, the Art and Language Study Day explores the relationship between art and language in multiple and unexpected ways.

Thinking about teaching art in the classroom and gallery cross-culturally, artist Evan Ifekoya and Uvanney Maylor, Professor of Education at the University of Bedfordshire, explore the significance of language in relation to discussions around race and cultural difference. Using the Spaces of Black Modernism display at Tate Britain as a starting point, this year’s Art and Language study day will unpick representations of race in art and education through the objects in the collection.

Questioning assumptions around how culture is produced and consumed and by who, the study day explores the gaps and absences in art and education in terms of who makes art and what type of art they make, who mediates or interprets visual culture and who is depicted in art and how.

This year’s Art and Language Study Day seeks to draw the gallery and the classroom into close proximity by taking material and experience from both contexts. Using art in the gallery to explore issues of cultural difference, you will be encouraged to bring your own knowledge and experience of language around race encountered in the classroom as material to consider in relation to the art in the museum. Can conversations about race and difference ‘get in the way’ of looking at art? Is it possible to look at art without these conversations? Why can it be difficult to find the language to talk about race?