Qualla: Dartington College of Arts

Dartington College of Arts: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Where else could a student fulfil their degree requirement by working in a lighthouse? Or a fish shop? Or with a single child with a disability? Dartington College of Arts ran for nearly fifty years on the premise that art belonged everywhere the established arts did not normally go, and it sent its students into those places to prove it. The college closed in 2010, its title dropped, its faculty scattered. What it taught, however, drifted outward. The Turner Prize, the rise of socially engaged art, the academic respectability of performance writing - all of these owe something to the experiment that ran from 1961 to 2010 in a Devon valley most of the art world had to look up on a map.

Dartington College of Arts: Out of the Elmhirst Experiment

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Dartington Hall had already been an experiment for thirty years by the time the college opened in 1961. Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, a British-American millionaire couple inspired by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, bought the medieval estate in 1925 and set about rebuildin...

Dartington College of Arts: Release Work and Other Imports

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the early 1970s the American dancer Mary Fulkerson arrived at Dartington and introduced Release Work, a body-centred approach to movement that placed Dartington briefly at the centre of international experimental dance. Peter Hulton, who would later become Principal, founded t...

Dartington College of Arts: The Art and Social Context Course

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1977 Paul Oliver launched a two-year course called Art and Social Context. By 1986 Chris Crickmay had extended it into a three-year honours degree. Students worked in studios, but they also placed themselves in communities - in Dartmoor prison, in a Plymouth neighbourhood, in ...

Dartington College of Arts: Performance Writing

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1994 the college launched BA Hons. Performance Writing under the poet John Hall, with significant contributions from Caroline Bergvall. There had never been an undergraduate degree quite like it. The course took writing seriously as a performed and embodied practice, the meeti...

Dartington College of Arts: Closure and Echo

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 1988 Education Reform Act had ended Dartington's local authority funding. The 1990s rescue plan partnered the college with Polytechnic South West, later the University of Plymouth, and survived for two more decades. In 2008 Dartington became part of University College Falmout...