Open House Festival

‘OPEN’ Beyond Beck Road (part II)

community/cultural, gallery, event, art studio, art in the public realm, bridge, historical house

Unknown, 1890

Beck Road, Hackney, E8 4RE

Architecture and art produced in an unmodified street of 56 houses, railway arch studios, and private galleries between 1974 and 2023. Beck Rd is an iconic artist haven and its residents are key contributors to UK art history.

Getting there

Tube

Bethnal Green

Train

Cambridge Heath, London Fields, Hackney Central

Bus

26, 48, 55, 106, 254, 277, 388

Additional travel info

Buses stop at St. Joseph's Hospice, King Edward's Road, Victoria Park Road

Access

About

Beck Road

Beyond Beck Road part II is a community arts event. This years exhibition titled 'OPEN' follows on from our previous event & exhibition, Beyond Beck Road, in 2022. It is an opportunity to bring together a mixed community and showcase to the local and wider community the far-ranging creative work in Beck Road and beyond.

Beck Road is an unusually mixed area of renters, social housing, homeowners and artist studios who are passionate about the streets heritage and maintaining it and the community that sustains it. This event provides an opportunity to present broad practice, involving a wide community that represents the diversity of the area coming together and provides a platform for artistic participation.

The exhibition will occur in residential spaces, a corner bar, railway arch studios, under a bridge and on Beck Road’s pavements, house facades and windows. It will include photography, sculpture, film, installations, workshops and performance.

Beyond Beck Road (part II) 'OPEN' - Raises a communal stage of common ground for an extended community!

Exhibition Program Bio:

Beyond Beck Road (part II) presents ‘OPEN’, a free public art event where the street becomes an exhibition space for the extended environs and its wider creative connections, reaching beyond a traditional gallery audience, positively impacting the broader community. The event focuses on the multilayered term ‘open’ with emphasis on the sensibility of ‘exposure’ being open spirited, reaching out, standing up, projecting our voices and offering support.
Beck Road itself houses resident artists and artist studios to the north and south of the bridge’s mouth. It is a living breathing creative space, using the street as a communal stage for a theatre of artistry, through inclusivity, participation and collaboration. Reflecting its location in the heart of Hackney as a vibrant and culturally expansive borough in conjunction with Open House London to highlight the roads significant heritage, ‘OPEN’ stimulates natural voyeuristic curiosity to draw in and further widen communities.
‘OPEN’ 2023 includes an array of workshops and creative out-reach projects, communicating through artistic expression to activate the notion of openness, in gesture and performance, through drawing, painting, portraiture, sculpture, photography and moving image, capturing individuality, beyond the frame of a thrown open window.

History of the street

Beck Road is a street with a history in its present form since 1890. The 56 houses and their residents were first recorded in the 1901 census. In the 1970s artists came to live and work among people born there. In the 1980s they began exhibiting individually at home and collaborated several times to present Open Studios with artists showing in studios at the same time. An artist-run space has exhibited for the last 8 years.

Participating Artists

Beyond Beck Road will showcase the work of individual and collective artists connected to the street and its environs. A public exhibition space with residents opening their houses and studios and using the street as a stage for live events.

@beyond.beckroad

Online presence

www.europeanheritagedays.com/Story/Beyond-Beck-Road-a-community-arts-and-heritage-event

www.melinamichael.com/beyondbeckroad

www.instagram.com/beyond.beckroad

Nearby

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