Patrick Brill’s Make Art Not War was a flagship project of 14-18 NOW, the UK-wide World War 1 centenary commemorative arts programme funded by Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in 2014-18.
The project built on Brill’s decades of socially motivated practice as Bob and Roberta Smith, testing the role, responsibility and domain of the public artist.
Make Art Not War invited students from Sixth Form and Further Education colleges across the UK to respond to an artistic provocation: “What Does Peace Mean to You?”.
Working in partnership with the Imperial War Museum, Make Art Not War reached 224,000 students at over 300 colleges and facilitated students’ discovery through creativity.
A student-centred brief promoting personal understandings of war and peace benefited students and artist-educators. This positive impact grew to improve curriculum diversification and inform educational policy debate.
The Director of global charity The Big Draw commented, “The way [Brill] produced MANW shows that he understands how precisely judged strategies of brief making, networked activities and patterns of encouragement can really help to democratise collective art practices at scale.”
Read the REF 2021 impact case study in full.
Full case study written by Prof. Matthew Barac, Rachal Bradley, Hannah Parr and Nicolas de Oliveira.
