About Us

Artmongers has been painting murals in South London for over 20 years. During this epic mural making journey, we developed a process of engaging community groups in our creative process. We managed to engage a large part of Lewisham´s population creating over seventeen murals in the borough.

Young artists started to gravitate towards what we were doing and reached out in search of advice or offering to volunteer. We noticed that they would need a lot more support and understanding of processes if they were to become practising mural artist, and so the idea of the School of Muralism emerged.

Our course provides the tools to understand how practitioners can have a positive impact in society while practicing their artistic skills and eventually making a living off it.

The concept of the school is a space where practicing muralists pass on valuable skills to the new generation and create a mutually supportive community of artists, change makers and cultural entrepreneurs

We invited other active professional artists in the field, also based in South London, to contribute to the learning process of our students: Adee (Artful Dodger) Gary Drostle, Lionel Stanhope. We have also recruited a few of our outstanding graduates to also teach in the course: Nadina Ali, Shauna Blanchfield, Liv Wright, Al Leys and Amaechi Anolue.

To set up the school, we harvested the good will we had created locally by crowdfunding on Spacehive a total of 62K. Our supporters included Goldsmiths, GLA, Lewisham Council, Brewers and over three hundred residents who trusted us to deliver our first educational programme.

Three pilot courses run through a period of eighteen months, delivering 36 scholarships, 33 student-led new murals, 6 school-led murals, over 200 participants involved, 96 sessions and 288 hours of teaching. To improve our approach, we evaluated each stage with Imogen Slater (The Art of Regenation). You can read the evaluative review here

Our course is constantly evolving and its sustainability is too, We now run a hybrid model, where students play a part of the cost and we apply to funding to be able to offer scholarships to people who really want them and cannot afford the course. Our fourth course was the first one that students payed a fee, which has increased commitment from students and the prospect of the school continuing to grow.