One point of consensus in these apparently divided times is that art education is in trouble. In the ​​US, a recent study highlighted the relationship between student debt and arts graduates pursuing careers outside their academic field, while the British Academy has warned that arts courses are being ‘extinguished’ in cuts from cash-starved UK universities. Yet a growing number of free, alternative, art school models – offering courses in both art making and curating – are responding to the crisis. Some are modeled in a countercultural vein; others offer a practical, institutional alternative to art school; all, however, are committed to building a closer sense of community among their students.

Class action 

In 2023, New Curators, established by former Tate curators Mark Godfrey and Kerryn Greenberg, received its first annual cohort of 11 fellows. Focused on low-income applicants, New Curators has a premise as simple as it is game-changing: not only are there no fees to attend the London-based postgraduate curatorial program, complete with a final exhibition at South London Gallery, but it actually employs its students for the duration of the course and pays the official London Living Wage while they study. In 2026, in recognition of their work, the pair were honored in the Allies category at the Art Basel Awards.  

The program is open only to those ‘from structurally disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds,’ be that ‘housing insecurity in childhood’ or ‘reliance on government financial support,’ as its website explains. ‘We don’t talk about class nearly enough in our industry; it is the main stumbling block to a career in the arts and I think we’ve lost so much talent because it’s inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t come from financial means,’ says Greenberg. 

Godfrey points out that fixing the crisis of accessibility in art schools, which high fees have partly led to, will go a long way in creating a better, more inclusive art ecosystem in other ways too. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the rise of Black Lives Matter and the centering of identity politics, there has been intense reflection on how diverse the art world’s institutions are. New Curators’ current crop of fellows’ hometowns range from Cape Town to New Delhi. ‘There was a widespread accounting going on in the museum field, from who was on the board to what was in the collection,’ Godfrey reflects. ‘A number of museums were calling for more diverse curators, but there wasn’t a real pipeline for those curators.’

‘It’s not enough for the program just to be free,’ he continues. ‘Fellows from around the world need to be supported while they’re studying so that they don’t have to work multiple jobs and can really concentrate on their own professional development.’

Learning for learning’s sake

The Venezuelan artist Miguel Braceli, whose La Escuela offers another alternative education model, agrees that art schools’ high cost means that students expect a return on their investment, with courses perhaps losing their radical potential: ‘There’s this client-based dynamic that has grown up between professors and students.’ He established La Escuela to recalibrate the relationship. First receiving funding from the corporate nonprofit Siemens Stiftung, Braceli’s platform now partners with organizations across North and South America on its itinerant public ‘classrooms,’ as well as running online ‘labs’ and a library of essays and other material.

‘La Escuela was born not to train artists but as a community of people interested in art and education or in community-based practices,’ Braceli explains. He says inspiration came from Latin America’s history of radical educational experiments – including Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), which envisaged students as partners in their schooling, and the outside classrooms Cecilia Vicuña and her group Tribu No staged on the streets of Santiago, in which the public played games – but also his experience teaching in Caracas universities. There, because of Venezuela’s economic crisis, he barely got paid. ‘This led to a pure interest in learning. I was only teaching the things that I wanted to learn about myself. It became about co-creation in public space with students, seeking answers to our own pressing issues.’ The artist notes that precarity can be an educational tool, something he has brought to the La Escuela model. ‘It’s not that we have established rules, a format, and a curatorial approach we parachute in. Circumstances dictate the model.’

Shared concerns and camaraderie

Christine Tohmé, who founded the Home Workspace Program in Beirut 15 years ago, also sees peer-to-peer learning as an essential element, especially in moments of crisis and for artists based outside the traditional art world centers. ‘We did not want to replicate the traditional structures of arts education,’ she says. Though the program originally took students internationally, due to the security situation in Lebanon it is now accepting only local applicants. ‘Inevitably that meant losing some of that international exchange,’ Tohmé reflects. ‘At the same time, the shift created a different kind of intimacy. The fellows were all navigating the same political and economic realities, and that shared experience produced a strong sense of camaraderie and collective reflection.’

Ultimately, to provide free education, alternative models need to find alternative funding. Home Workspace is an arm of Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, which, like La Escuela, has a diverse range of institutional patrons paying for students’ education. The financial support New Curators pays adds another layer of expense – the organization covers visa applications, relocation fees, and health surcharges from its annual budget of around GBP 750,000. Godfrey says private patronage should play a part in education too and credits the experience he and Greenberg acquired in this area at Tate with emboldening their approach: ‘If you come from the world of education, [fundraising can] feel like an impossible idea,’ he says, ‘but one person’s London living wage for a year isn’t a sum that a great philanthropist will agonize about.’

Small means, big names

It is the kind of bureaucracy that is anathema to Piero Golia, the cofounder, with fellow Los Angeles artist Eric Wesley, of The Mountain School of Arts. The pair established their radical artist-run school 21 years ago, originally in a room above a bar in the city’s Chinatown, where they coaxed the likes of Dan Graham and Simone Forti into giving free talks to whoever turned up (people did, in their hundreds). The Mountain has formalized a little in its two decades. Now it operates within a set three-week period annually, with a much smaller number of students applying to share a house that will receive visits from high-profile luminaries. Golia says speakers are attracted to how relaxed everything is. ‘Most real artists had to quit teaching. If you have a full-on career, maybe you want to take two days to go and share with young people, but these days [in mainstream education] you’ll spend another two on the paperwork.’ Golia follows Braceli’s idea that a school must be rooted in local culture, albeit in a very Californian way. ‘I try to borrow a big house, in which all the students can live together,’ Golia says. ‘For a couple of years, it was the villa used in The Godfather films,’ he adds.

‘We want somewhere big and joyful, a place with a pool that we can invite bands to play, where students can chat with Pierre Huyghe one day and Charles Ray the next, and that these big names might remember those conversations. Everything becomes spontaneous and free. I pay for a minibus out of my own money, that’s all.’

By bringing art education outside the market economy, these endeavors create closely bonded cohorts that are not operating with a commercial mindset. Whether students are curating shows in South London or talking conceptual art on sun loungers, all those interviewed say that the aim is to influence the art world beyond the schools, creating something more community focused and lowering barriers for those too often locked out of the conversation. Greenberg affirms, ‘We hope our graduates will go back into the institutions and mix things up a bit, and create opportunities for other people after them.’