Art Licks Weekend is a three day arts festival taking place across South and East London from 2-4 October which connects audiences with developing art scenes. The festival draws visitors towards the artistic spaces that exist beyond the central London gallery circuit in order to celebrate the valuable contribution that emerging artists make to the international art scene.
Art Licks’ ultimate aim is to turn the spotlight on younger, lesser-known artistic spaces around the capital, and to show how creatives, who are being continuously priced out of the capital, are reinterpreting the ways in which we use space in order to restore the balance. Art Licks is the only festival whose sole focus is on taking a grassroots [attitude] to the London art scene. Utilising over 90 gallery spaces such as Banner Repeater, the Ballad of Peckham Rye, Vulpes Vulpes and Flat Time House, the festival also spreads into private living areas and the urban commons, with railway arches and tube stations also among the appropriated areas.
2015 marks the third year of the festival, which was founded in 2013 by Holly Willats, who has been vocal about the impact of rising property prices on London creatives. Art Licks offers more visibility to this ongoing issue and raises public and industry support for emerging artists. In 2014 Holly was named in the Evening Standard’s list of London’s Most Influential Arts Personalities due to her championing of grassroots artists and their use of nontraditional spaces.
(Holly Willats, Art Licks Founder)
This year’s festival will span locations from East London into New Cross, Deptford and Peckham and back into Hackney. Alongside the artwork, there will also be a packed programme of talks and tours across the sites. If you can’t be there in person, listen to all the action from the comfort of your own home as Radio Anti will be broadcasting coverage of all Art Licks goings on, as well as hosting interviews and performances, across the weekend.
To mark the launch of this edition of Art Licks, a debate will be taking place at the South London Gallery on the 3rd October.
