Our workshops invite young people to explore art, architecture and art history through experimental, hands-on approaches. Running each spring, they are open to all 18-24-year-olds. Whether you’re studying art or art history, exploring it for the first time or just interested in trying something new, these in-person workshops encourage curiosity and critical openness, while learning from each other.
From 2026, places will be allocated via an application process instead of ticketed events.
The programme is free and participants are expected to attend all workshops in the series. Group sizes are kept small to ensure a supportive learning environment and meaningful participation for everyone.
All venues are wheelchair accessible and we are committed to making our programming fully open and inclusive. Funding is available to support travel, personal assistance or other requirements. Please contact learning@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
Current Programme
Writing Sensations
2–18 April 2026
Through writing exercises, facilitated discussion and shared reading, you will be invited to explore experimental and alternative approaches to creative and critical writing that centre personal voice and lived experience. You will work across forms including criticism, poetry, experimental non-fiction, self-publishing and embodied and place-based writing, to develop practical tools for writing on, through and beyond art and architecture. Meeting as the same group each week, the sessions will unfold through observation, movement, conversation and reflection, offering opportunities to embrace not knowing, curiosity and critical openness, and learning from each other.
Learn more here.
Past Programme
Gender and Cloth 2025
4 – 15 April
Join our hosts Gabe Beckhurst, Jess Bailey and collaborators for Gender and Cloth 2025. Through hands-on workshops, museum collections and site visits, we will celebrate how different communities have creatively explored gender through the cultural traditions of cloth. You will learn how artists work in different ways with textiles in art history from the worlds of banner making, batik and Risograph printing, using practices that foster social connection and belonging and deepen our understandings of identity, diaspora, family and protest. We will use our hands and minds to explore the ongoing significance of these traditions, learning how to think through storied legacies of specific techniques and asking how these practices of communicating through cloth can be taken forward.