Our Values
The Common College of Art is a response to the reality that art education is slowly becoming more and more expensive and corporatized. All over the world, universities are cutting down on contact hours, raising their tuition fees to be able to keep up with growing administrative maintenance and building expensive campuses with no regards to the specifics that art education requires.
With art education becoming more and more expensive, art is turning into a luxurious career option for those who can afford it, while working class students are put under added pressure all throughout their studies to be able to pay their tuition fees, afford daily life and find a (often barely sustainable) balance between their studies and student jobs.
The quality of teaching is impacted too: teachers are given few resources they have to use scarcely, students spend less and less time learning together, and most of the learning hours are spent on independent study, which can easily turn into an isolated practice. Finally, the administration of art universities is becoming more and more opaque to students, discouraging them from understanding the challenges art education is facing, taking initiative in their learning and from asking for change and support.
We believe in art education, and in the impact it can have on the lives of everyone involved. We believe all education is about community, and about collective decision-taking. Our goal with the CCA is to move beyond parody, actively imagining other ways to teach and learn while drawing inspiration from previous initiatives and projects.
How much does it really take to make a school?
Studying at the CCA
The CCA offers one program so far, the One Hour Masters. Each Masters consists of a one hour teaching and learning session, blending in lectures, screenings, practical workshops and conversations. Participants assume both a learning and teaching position, because teaching should be a learning experience too. Rather than a teacher-student hierarchy, we aim to experiment with a more horizontal system, seeing learning as a collective process taking place between peers.
Each Masters is centred on a different subject, organized differently, but all question contemporary art education.
Admission Process
The term Common marks our school as being accessible and free. Education should be common in the primary sense of the term, it should be available to all, non-discriminatory.
Attendance of our Masters is entirely free and open to all. Like most art schools (allegedly), we will not discriminate based on identity, origins, religion, gender, mental and physical health, but we also refuse to discriminate based on income, level of education or family situation.
Our admission process is simple : the door is open.
Leave us your email and we'll loop you in on when and where we will be with our workshops and programming
Thank you!
Our Campus
The CCA started at the Royal College of Art, which is the space in which we studied, a space we worked from, on, and about, but it aims to unfolds in different types of artistic and non-artistic spaces, to experiment on the many ways in which a space influences teaching and learning practices - artists’ studios, a gallery space, a museum, a park outside, someone’s living room, a cinema…
