What Artists Want, What Artists Need: A Critical History of the Feral Art School, Hull, UK 2018 – Present

The article contextualises the emergence of the Feral Art School, established in Hull in 2018 by artist-educators following the winding down of Hull School of Art and Design. This alternative art school is the most recent of many established in the UK since the government’s Independent Review of Higher Education Funding & Student Finance or Browne Review. This article argues that the processes of ‘economisation’ enacted by this review have severely threatened the health of arts education in the UK, forcing the closure of provision and increasing barriers to higher education arts education for the disadvantaged. This article uses the example of Feral Art School to demonstrate how provincial art schools might re-emerge in new, counter-hegemonic forms. The Feral Art School is run as a Community Interest Company (CIC) with cooperative values. We argue that these values extend to the philosophy of education underpinning all of Feral’s activities.