UCL project uncovering hidden gems in Slade Archive

A new project between the Slade School of Fine Art and UCL Centre for Digital Humanities is exploring and mapping hidden gems from the Slade Archive. The project will trial various online platforms and tools to help unearth, track and bridge together the varied histories of the School, its former staff and students, and chart their significant impact in the art world - both nationally and internationally. Including objects and artefacts dating throughout the Slade's history at UCL, the archive collection contains rich evidence of the time artists, such as Richard Hamilton and Rachel Whiteread, spent there. Together with materials held in UCL Special Collections and UCL Art Museum, the extensive on-site archive also contains papers, photographs, class lists, audio-tapes and signing-in books. "At UCL we have this amazing archive containing wonderful materials and objects from the Slade over the past 142 years, however much of this archive is difficult to access," said Melissa Terras (UCL Centre for Digital Humanities). "As a result, the idea behind the archive project is to explore ways of presenting this information to a wider audience, and highlighting the amazing things we have hidden away at UCL."  Since 1871 the Slade School of Fine Art has educated and trained generations of world-renowned artists, from Gwen and Augustus John, Stanley Spencer and Ben Nicholson around the turn of the 20th century and early 1900s, to William Coldstream, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi in the 1930s and 40s, through to Derek Jarman, Paula Rego, Euan Uglow and Craigie Aitchison in the 50s and 60s.