We’re taking art and creativity on the road, across the UK.
From May 2024 to May 2025, our travelling art studio programme, Art Road Trip, is visiting 18 places across the UK.
We’re going to be working with 24 local arts organisations to create community-led arts projects. In each location, we’re designing events for people with the least access to creative opportunities and the arts.
Over the year, our mobile art studio will host around two hundred public events and work with thousands of people to bring art and ideas inspired by the National Gallery Collection right to where they live.
Where is the Art Road Trip now?
Blackpool, 11‒21 September
In Blackpool, we're partnering with local arts organisation LeftCoast. LeftCoast delivers highly engaging and socially useful arts and cultural projects in Blackpool. They facilitate connections between artists and residents by co-creating artworks and projects that elevate local voices, encourage exploration and play, and make a difference on personal and community levels.
Over two weeks, Art Road Trip’s travelling studio is visiting nine Blackpool locations, working with local artists Nerissa Cargill Thompson, Joseph Doubtfire and Lizza Lane to host a series of drop-in and hands-on activities inspired by the flower paintings of Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch from the National Gallery Collection and get us thinking about how plants, growth and creativity shape our daily lives.
Tying into LeftCoast’s Right To Grow Manifesto and its exploration of ‘what it means to live a creative life,’ people can explore a botanical lab filled with handmade specimens, craft their own faux terrariums, create virtual floral artworks, and make symbolic floral arrangements that tell their own stories, plus much more.
The travelling art studio is popping up at locations throughout Blackpool, inviting everyone to join in. Come and find us from 11 to 21 September at either Wash Your Words, @TheGrange, Claremont Community Centre, St John’s Square with Abingdon Studios, Tower Festival Headland, Revoelution, Louie Horrocks Park, Bostonway Community Centre, and Blackpool Central Library.
For more information about LeftCoast and the programme, visit their website here.
