It is always pleasing to see educational efforts being made to help those groups not normally catered for with online education in these tough times of home lockdown. This article from The Guardian is a good example of such.
A free lockdown arts programme aimed at the over-70s will kick off on Tuesday morning with a lecture on one of the most mysterious paintings in art: the Velázquez masterpiece Las Meninas.
The Arts Society, the UK’s leading arts education charity with 90,000 members, has announced a series of free online lectures, film screenings and live Q&As by authors that will run over the coming months.
The society’s bread and butter activity is helping to stage events and museum trips where its members meet up for cultural activities face to face. Now they are among those hit hardest by the crisis.
Florian Schweizer, the society’s chief executive, said “A lot of our members are more mature which is why our initial response was ‘How can we get them connected back with each other and with us?’
The first lecture being broadcast at 11am on Tuesday is by the art historian Jacqueline Cockburn and was recorded in her home by her son. She had been due to lecture on Picasso at the society’s now-cancelled annual general meeting and suggested Las Meninas, which hangs in the Prado in Madrid, as a shorter alternative for the new project.
A good news story in these gloomy times.
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