Wanted: artwork to challenge the National Gallery’s arms trade links

Last year the National Gallery hosted an evening reception to celebrate the first day of business at DSEI, the world’s largest arms fair.

The Gallery allows arms company Finmeccanica to buy the opportunity to use the Gallery’s rooms for its ‘corporate entertaining’. By doing so, it is giving both practical support and a veneer of legitimacy to an industry based on death and destruction.

But public criticism can make the Gallery reconsider. Join the campaign to get the arms dealers out of the arts.

Create an artwork to challenge the Gallery’s arms trade links

We think art has the potential to transform society, and we need your help. We’re creating an online gallery of art which shows that the arms trade has no place in the National Gallery.

The brief: Taking inspiration from the iconic paintings displayed in the National Gallery, create a piece that helps put our message across.

You may choose an existing piece as your starting point, or you may prefer to tread new ground. You don’t have to be a fine artist to take part. Captions and speech bubbles are welcome too!

We hope to be able to print contributions for a physical exhibition later in the year, so if possible, please submit a high resolution version of your piece (ideally at least 300 dpi).

How to submit your artwork

Email your pieces, or photos of them to info(at)stopthearmsfair*org*uk. The gallery will start off virtual, on Facebook and Flickr. Later in the year, we want to set up a travelling exhibition of people’s work – more on that later.

If it’s a physical piece, you can submit a photo online or send it to Sarah Waldron, Campaign Against Arms Trade, Unit 4, 5-7 Wells Terrace, London, N4 3JU.

Find out more about the campaign

More info: https://www.caat.org.uk/campaigns/disarm-the-gallery/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/disarmthegallery
Twitter: #artnotarms

The boring bit…

All submissions will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Basically, that means that (a) people can’t use them for profit (b) people can share them as long as they credit the original artist. The Disarm the Gallery campaign may use your work on flyers and campaign material, but we don’t make any money from it, and we’ll try to contact you if we do.