Nottingham Contemporary

Our programme for 15-25 year olds, is for any young people wanting to be creative, gain experiences, take part in social events or get their voice heard about the things that matter.

This past year has been full of exciting projects, talks, workshops and events for and by young people.

We started the year with 1525: Rights To Our City, a series of walking and creative workshops lead by our associate artist Amelia Diaz. The workshops hoped to reimagine our city as a place for play and a stage for hidden mythologies to emerge into, giving light to the underappreciated and transforming the everyday-ness and hostile architectures into places that represent your ideas and vision. Over the series we explored the art of walking, photography techniques, cyanotype and screen-printing, poetry, and drawing maps.

We launched our beautiful mural artwork commission by Winter Beaumont in collaboration with GenderPhoria, a support group for gender variant young people and 1525 Collective. Winter ran a sigil making workshop with the members and interpreted their design into a collective sigil named Saphœðra (pronounced sah-fo-ethra). The mural is located in Gallery Zero (the room off Gallery 1) and you can find out more information about this project there!

*Sigils are a type of symbol used in magickal practice, they are created uniquely with a specific purpose or intended outcome.

Our 1525 collective experienced sessions with our curators and gallery assistant team, alongside graphic design workshops, and portfolio building sessions.

They presented The Lyceum* - a 2 part event series, hosting talks about non-mainstream education, creative failure, activism, and the politics of art. The Lyceum was a social space, in a live radio show style, hoping to address what is lacking in education and how education is not one-size-fits-all.

*The Lyceum has meaning rooted in education; here we’ve chosen to refer to it as ‘a public forum or performance space’ showing the multifaceted nature of education.

“It’s nice knowing we have the space to educate ourselves and talk about it with other people” - 1525 Member

We collaborated with Qaa’sim Uhuru and Haddy Touray to deliver ‘’Capoeira: The Godmother of Hip-hop’, a project exploring how music and movement have been used to retain history and identity in resistance to social injustice and its role in forming a new culture. This unfolded to become a movement workshop blending Hip-hop and Capoeira practices, and a film screening of ‘NG83: When We Were B Boys’ followed by a Q+A.

“I really enjoyed it from the beginning all the way to the end! I’ve been involved with other things before to do with dance...but this was different because other people were involved. My favourite part of the whole project was the Q+A." - Collaborator

Our Slow Craft Social, returned by popular demand. Emma Graves, Textile artist and our Visitor Services Supervisor, and Chan Fagan, our Youth programmer, delivered a presentation sharing the Slow Craft Social from the perspective of addressing youth loneliness. They’ll be sharing their findings from the socials, sharing practice and reflections in an upcoming conference by Kids in Museums.

Thank you to our funders, supporters, artists and participants for keeping this programme alive!

We wish you the best for 2025.

Click here to find out more about 1525 Collective.