Barbican Art Box zine launch

Last week we celebrated the launch of the Barbican Art Box zine anthology and look how good they look!

The zine anthology is the culmination of a nearly year long project with the Barbican's creative learning team. I worked with artists Paula Varjack, Åbäke, and Rhiannon Adam across 6 East London schools in response to the Barbican's Basquiat exhibition.

Participants learned about Basquiat, zines, and diy culture before making new work with artists relating to graffiti, text, and polaroid photography. The work was then pulled together into a series of zines, each zine representing the work of each school.

It's been such a wonderful experience and the launch last week was incredible. Some of the young participants gave presentations, talking about the influence of Basquiat and diy culture in their work and the things they had learned. The idea of public speaking as a teenager would have been horrifying to me, but these students are more brave and energetic than my teenage self ever was and it blew me away.

The personalities of each school really shine through in these zines and they feel so personal and explore some really interesting work. The final zine anthology is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the students created throughout the project. It felt like we could have easily made an individual anthology for each student at least! 

Finding out that some of the students have continued to make zines after the project had finished, swapping and sharing their work with their friends and classmates is amazing to me and I'm always so excited when people realise just how ridiculously easy it can be to self publish and share work and ideas. I can't wait to see what they do next.

Images from the zine anthology are now on display at the Barbican in the cinema cafe

Photos by Paula Varjack