In May 2025, Open School East will begin seeking applications from emerging artists and practitioners to join the twelfth year of its independent, self-directed, and outward-facing artist development programme.

Key Dates

Thursday 1 May 2025
Open Call for Associates Programme Begins

Friday 20 June 2025
Open Call for Associates Programme Ends

Monday 7 – Thursday 10 July 2025
Interviews for Prospective Associates

The Associates Programme runs from September 2025 – July 2026.

To be notified when the open call goes live, please sign up to our mailing list.

Associates Programme

The Associates Programme is a free artist development programme offering a critical, informal and non-competitive environment in which to develop your practice and expand your networks. The programme is run according to principles of collaboration, experimentation and openness, and welcomes those who engage with these notions in different ways.

The Associates Programme runs for a year and is principally self-directed, creating platforms to experiment and meet long-lasting collaborators and peers.

Whilst taking part in the Associates Programme, we provide a shared workspace and access to OSE’s library space and resources, as well as opportunities to meet and work with leading artists and cultural practitioners.

Find more details at openschooleast.org/programmes/associates-programme.

OSE’s thematic approach for 2024-26:
Home is where the garden is

OSE’s programming theme for 2024-26, titled Home is where the garden is, explores the garden as a metaphor for spaces of cultivation, rooting, and unexpected encounters. It is built around an ecological, rhizomatic framework that focuses on the networks, systems and communities that form civic space. Throughout the cycle we will be developing artworks, events, exhibitions and resources led by artists, community partners and Associates.

Home is where the garden is follows three research strands themes: Civic Space, Material, and Produce.

In Home is where the garden is, we see civic space as an entwined mesh of shared social and political space shaped by material and social interventions and interrelations. A space where people from different cultures, ages and lived experiences meet and cross paths.

Explorations in material unearth energies, knowledge and skills across space and (deep) time. Material mediates living and non-living ecosystems. Materials can engender and disrupt techniques and technologies. They can be malleable, rigid, raw, uncertain, virtual, charged, found and processed. 

We understand produce as both a verb (to produce) and a collective noun that is connected to industry and land. In both directions it exposes the ways in which energy put in is processed and expelled; about how things are made; about transit and distribution; about how raw materials are changed by human and non-human forces.

Home is where the garden is invites prospective Associate artists who relate to these themes, to explore them through the development of artistic research, talks, workshops, collective projects and artworks with us and our various partners.

The Civic programme runs September 2024 – September 2025.
The Associates join September 2024 – July 2026.

How OSE Programmes

Home is where the garden is is the first cycle of Open School East’s new two-year programming model. Through a two-year thematic approach this model explores how artists can work in more embedded, durational ways with OSE’s local community of practitioners, researchers, community partners, and public organisations. It will nurture a new generation of artists for whom community building and social impact are central to their work. It also aims to build new civic networks whilst testing and developing both individual and collaborative approaches to artistic research and art-making.

As part of our two-year model, we are working to flatten and remap the hierarchy of knowledge in our practice, as a leading alternative arts education provider, and in each of our programming strands and community-led projects. Our theme responds to environmental injustices as well as the civic use of our spaces, land and green areas.

This cycle invites artists and community members to work together to explore the evolving and rhizomatic threads that link our shared civic space, through a series of artistic commissions, collaborative projects, public workshops and community initiatives. 

To find out more about our two-year programming model, please visit: openschooleast.org/building-an-art-school-for-the-future