We designed a limited edition screenprint for Pete McKee’s, ‘This Class Works’ exhibition.
‘This Class Works‘ is an exhibition organised by renown Sheffield Artist, Pete McKee. Cafeteria were invited by McKee to contribute to his collaborative project, ‘The Department of Wealth and Privilege’. Clearly, we accepted.
The brief — to design a slogan poster based on the “elite’s apparent distain for the working class”. This idea grew from a long-standing rumour that, during the fevered strikes and protests of the late eighties, Thatcher met with leading marketeers to conjure ad campaigns that attempted to silence the voices of the working class. The propaganda would’ve been output across tabloids and thrown up on billboards throughout the country’s most impoverished areas. Out of the eight contentious subjects for us to choose from, our heartfelt allegiance, as a creative studio, rested with Education.
In recent years, arts ed. has suffered from drastic funding cuts, leading to an increasing number of schools axing creative subjects from academic curriculums. This ultimately leaves a growing number of children with fewer opportunities to develop lateral thinking and throw off the shackles of parrot fashion learning (unless you have the “privilege” of a private education, of course). This stringent scheme undeniably lacks logic as in 2017 the creative industries recorded their best contribution to the UK economy – a staggering £92 billion. So it’s not economical, it’s ideological — deliberate action to quash imagination and weaken the challenge against those in power.
