The New School is located in the heart of Bloomsbury, an epicentre for artistic and intellectual enquiry for three centuries. The host for our first two years was October Gallery, a transvangarde hub for contemporary art, performance and music from across the world.
The Gallery is part of the Institute of Ecotechnics, which has acted on a planetary scale over five decades to generate a series of spectacular biosphere demonstration projects. These include Biosphere 2 the ocean-going RV Heraclitus, the rainforest enrichment venture of Las Casas de la Selva Patillas and the Eden in Iraq water remediation garden.
In late 2024 we moved 100 yards north across Queen Square to the fully accessible Art Workers' Guild founded in 1884 by a group of British painters, sculptors, architects and designers associated with the ideas of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement.
From its foundation, the Guild promoted the 'unity of the all arts,' denying academic distinctions between fine and applied activity. It moved into its incomparably elegant and welcoming Georgian building in 1914.
The New School continues to flex between locations and learning approaches (including digital) as individual projects demand. We are perhaps less a physical site, than a situation: a making (poein) by people engaged with each other and with ideas.
The Guild today comprises 400 artists, craftsmen and designers with a common interest in the interaction, development and distribution of creative skills, and representing over 60 creative disciplines. Their charitable aim is to support the visual arts and crafts in any way that may be beneficial to the community.
“I paint what I don’t know.”
“I play what I don’t know.”