Royal College of Art celebrates its 175th year with major exhibition

The exhibition aims to offer an insight to the RCA’s operations as well as spark discussions on how art and design education should be organised and on the purpose of publicly funded art schools.

The exhibition has been designed in four sections. Art for Industry includes work by painters such as Richard Redgrave, whose talents were recruited in the service of industry. This section also concentrates on how the need for design to contribute to British industry has been discussed across three centuries, starting with works from Henry Cole representing the 19th century and ending with James Dyson’s from this century.

The Public Purpose area focuses on the college’s role in transforming Britain’s public services and the built environment. Featured are works by Sir Hugh Casson, the director of architecture of Festival of Britain who later became the professor of interior design at RCA. Also on display are pieces from Thomas Heatherwick, who designed the British pavilion for the Shanghai Expo in 2010 as well as the cauldron for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Political Expression features artists and designers whose work has been aligned to political causes, for example by the likes of Sylvia Pankhurst – the suffragette jailed in Holloway Prison while a student at RCA – and artists David Hockney and Peter Kennard.

The fourth part of the exhibition, Personal Expression, aims to contrast the Victorian notion of art in the service to industry, morality or religion with 20th-century concepts of fine art as an act of personal creative expression.

This section includes, among others, works by Henry Moore, Ron Arad and Tracey Emin. Emin’s piece The Perfect Place to Grow (2001) also inspired the name of the exhibition.

The Perfect Place to Grow: 175 Years of the Royal College of Art is co-curated by Dr Paul Thompson, rector of the RCA, and Robert Upstone of the Fine Art Society. The Royal College of Art was founded in
1837 as the Government School of Design to train craftsmen and artisans to work in the ceramics, textiles and ornamental crafts sectors of the British manufacturing industries.

To coincide with the anniversary celebrations, the RCA has also opened a new academic building, named the Dyson Building after the academy’s alumnus, industrial designer James Dyson.