On my way home | Kerry Campbell
Market Gallery invites you to join us for the fifth episode of our reading group On My Way Home. The facilitator and guest selector for this session is curator and producer Kerry Campbell.
Saturday 7th September 3 – 5pm
For this session Kerry will be discussing both statistical and more nuanced structural inequality in the arts and cultural sector. The reading group will feature a collective reading of a chapter from Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) – a seminal commentary on class which afforded timely dignity and recognition to working class culture, sparking the birth of ‘cultural studies’ as an arena of research. The chapter The Uprooted and the Anxious will be taken as the starting point of a group discussion which intends to consider cultural capital and social mobility as well as cultural alienation.
A further reference to both the Panic! Social Class, Taste & Inequalities in the Creative Industries report as well as the more recent Jerwood Arts paper on Socio-Economic Diversity & Inclusion in the Arts will support a collective understanding of how social class intersects with race, class, sexuality and disability today to compound inequality of opportunity in the sector.
With a focus on collective and peer learning, no prior reading needs to be undertaken before the session. Bursaries for travel and childcare costs are available for those in need, please e-mail market@marketgallery.org for more information.
‘On my way home’ is an expanded reading group that explores belonging through the intersections of personal identity, privilege and oppression. Together we will move through realms of belonging to communities and bodies including local, city-wide, national, global and intergalactic realms. As an exercise in collaborative programming, the reading group will build towards a weekend-long festival in October.
Kerry Campbell is a freelance curator and producer. Campbell’s curatorial practice is informed by her interests in regional curating, diversifying arts engagement and understanding the complex relationship between social class and barriers to arts engagement and representation. She is the founding director and curator of TMT Projects, Luton – an arts platform invested in supporting emerging to mid career artists and delivering ambitious, locally informed exhibitions and projects.
Campbell graduated with a Curating Contemporary Art Masters from the Royal College of Art in 2017, with the earlier completion of an alternative free Arts MA with School of the Damned (2014 -’15) catalysing a further curatorial interest in the inclusive potential of alternative pedagogy. In 2018 she was awarded an Arts Council International Development fund to undertake international research on community led archives and the archival preservation of marginalised voices, with research published in print by Montez Press as an paper entitled ‘Class and Curating’.
Campbell has previously worked for five years with schools, families, young people and vulnerable groups within Education at the Victoria & Albert Museum and then as the Public Programmes Curator for Bloc Projects gallery in Sheffield. Campbell is currently the Residency Project Coordinator for Corridor8 as well as the Artistic Director at Mansions of the Future – a dynamic, three-year Art’s Council Ambitions for Excellence funded project in Lincoln, which privileges inherently social, site-specific, and collaborative ways of working.
Image credit: Kerry Campbell.