Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project
South London Gallery, London, England
2011 - 2013
LVYAP Summer Academy 2011, The Academy of Youth Mythology. Photo: Richard Eaton / REcreativeUK.com
The Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project was a partnership between Louis Vuitton and five of London’s leading art institutions. Led by the South London Gallery in collaboration with Tate, the Hayward Gallery, The Royal Academy and Whitechapel Gallery, it ran from 2010 until 2013.
This arts and education programme gave young Londoners from across the city unique access to the museum directors and curators, artists and collectors who shape the British contemporary art scene.
The Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project (LVYAP) became an ambitious network for young people’s groups aged 13-25 from each of the five institutions. The young people collectively visited exhibitions at the five partner institutions, where they had exclusive tours, developed and ran programs with and for their peers.
RECREATIVE: An online community and resource exploring contemporary art
REcreativeUK.com when it first launched.
LVYAP participants were also invited to peer-led creative sessions and site visits where they had the opportunity to meet artists and curators. Through additional focused workshops the young people devised and designed a website that launched in 2011, called REcreativeUK.com, for which I was the Young People’s Online Editor from 2011-2013.
The website, which is no longer active, launched as an online community and resource for young people interested in all aspects of the contemporary art world. In its first iteration it existed as an open platform where any young person could share and showcase their work, access resources, gain real world opportunities and get feedback on their work from both peers and art world professionals.
Participants from each of the five gallery’s youth collectives were also involved in the making of a series of curated short films that went behind-the-scenes in the art world to learn about different art world jobs, artist projects and careers, arts education and how to get started as an emerging artist through collectives, self-publishing and filmmaking.
Participants interviewed artists including Tracey Emin, Elmgreen & Dragset, Mark Wallinger and Yinka Shonibare MBE. They also interviewed art critics Oliver Basciano, publisher Jefferson Hack and Tate’s Senior Art Handling Technician Mikei Hall and Royal Academy of Arts archivist Mark Pomery, amongst many others.
In 2012 an Editorial Board of 10 young people was convened to help drive the direction of content and technical developments to the site and in 2013, REcreativeUK.com ran its first Film School, partnering emerging young filmmakers with an established filmmaker and mentor to create a series of short films in response to briefs from the Editorial Board.
In 2013 REcreativeUK also partnered with Camberwell College of Art to give 2nd year graphic design students a live brief to create a marketing campaign for the website, producing trailers like this, by students Yi, Sylvia and Liam.
Other opportunities offered by REcreativeUK included a tour by Grayson Perry of his exhibition The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum in 2011 and a creative brief set by Yayoi Kusama’s studio to create a work of art exploring the idea of obsession.
This brief was promoted to coincide with her major 2012 exhibition at Tate Modern and a panel of judges including SLG Director Margot Heller and Tate’s Francis Morris shortlisted five artists, whose works were then exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Maison on Bond St in June 2012. The winning work, by artist Yi Dai, was acquired by Louis Vuitton and Yi received a trip to Japan to meet Yayoi Kusama in her studio.
THE LVYAP SUMMER ACADEMY
Each year of the LVYAP, up to 60 young people from across each of the partner galleries were chosen to attend an intensive, five-day Summer Academy, the first of which took place in August 2010 at the Royal Academy Schools and Louis Vuitton New Bond Street. The Academies offered behind-the-scenes visits to galleries and conservation studios; talks by artists, curators and critics; and creative workshops and outcomes.
In 2011 the Academy took place at the Southbank Centre and explored ideas of live art. In 2012 it was hosted by artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset, who inspired a week looking at public art (after their Fourth Plinth Commission), which culminated in four temporary pop up public art sculptures that were accessible to the public.
The Academy Goes Public is a film I produced in my capacity as SLG Young People’s Online Editor. It documents the 2012 Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project Summer Academy.
The film was made by Gordon Beswick for REcreativeUK.com.
Beyond community engagement: Transforming dialogues in art, education and the cultural sphere
University of New South Wales / Common Ground Publishing, 2018
Edited by Kim Snepvangers and Donna Matthewson-Mitchell, Beyond Community Engagement features a peer-reviewed chapter co-authored with LVYAP Project Lead Sarah Coffils, “Collaboration or cooperation: Peer-led learning and institutional partnerships through two case studies.”
The chapter explores, from a practitioner-based perspective, two recent arts projects that employed peer-led and project-based models of learning to engage with audiences of young people aged 13-25.
These projects include the London-based Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project and the Pilot Regional Youth Engagement Project that formed part of Kaldor Public Art Projects’ Project 30 - Marina Abramovic: In Residence.
You can read more about Sarah’s and my chapter, including our abstract, and the approach we took to writing this paper here.