Ruth Ewan, The Glasgow Schools. Photo: Alan Dimmick
'The Glasgow Schools' is a project by artist Ruth Ewan. It maps out the city’s Proletarian, Socialist Sunday Schools and Socialist Fellowship Schools, part of a network of alternative educational organisations that once spread across the UK, of which Glasgow was a particular centre. The schools explored a spectrum of left-wing ideologies with children and young adults, from the Marxist revolutionary zeal of Tom Anderson’s Proletarian Schools (1918–c.1939) to the Christian leaning ethics of the early Socialist Sunday Schools (1896–1965), which later evolved into the Socialist Fellowship (1965–1980).
The exhibition brings together, for the first time, archive material relating to the schools from a number of public and private collections, accompanied by an events programme of talks and discussion, song, performance and magic. Ewan presents a series of poster works, a pamphlet, and a new documentary available to view here, made using archival footage and first hand accounts of the schools, exploring the affect they had on the lives of those involved. The project’s chosen exhibition space, Scotland Street School Museum, purposefully brings this influential and largely hidden movement into the wider context of Glasgow’s educational history.
Project Details
‘The Glasgow Schools’ was presented at Scotland Street School Museum. The project was curated by Kitty Anderson and Siobhan Carroll in association with The Common Guild as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.
