A huge art festival is heading to Corydon this month – and it’s completely free to attend
Eat your (he)art out
London is basically another word for culture at this point – it got named the best city in the whole world for culture just this year, thanks to its plethora of museums, galleries, theatres, comedy nights, music venues and cool free stuff that is pretty much constantly on. And whilst Croydon might not immediately spring to mind when you say both ‘London’ and ‘culture’, its latest exhibition might just prove the stereotype wrong.
Called Art on Our Doorstep: Croydon’s Contemporary Art Fair, the festival is a three-day celebration of the borough’s vibrant visual arts sector. Kicking off on 12th June and running until 14th, the festival will showcase contemporary works by 29 Croydonian artists, spanning every medium from photography to textiles and everything you’d see referenced on Art Attack.
The Whigift Centre will become a large-scale pop-up gallery to house the majority of works by the featured artists, but a wider programme of open studio tours will run alongside the gallery, featuring hands-on workshops, creative activities, and live music for the public to get involved with.
Spanning painting, photography, textiles, ceramics and mixed media, the fair highlights the breadth of artistic talent rooted in the borough. The exhibiting artists were selected through an open call in partnership with Turf Projects.
Visitors will encounter work by artists such as Agata Nowak, whose clay and print‑based practice centres on community connection; Ameena Rojee, an internationally exhibited Croydon photographer exploring our relationship with the natural world; and Georgia McKenzie, whose oil paintings draw on portraiture and realism. Other featured artists include Helen Holmes, José Rafael Mendes, Marcia John, Sharon Flowers and Skye Baker, reflecting the diversity of Croydon’s creative landscape.
The pinnacle of the weekend will be the big public reveal of the festival’s main feature, titled the Croydon Masterpiece. It’s a series of four large-scale artworks by award-winning Rachel Gadsden, who has used collaging artwork from over 200 local participants.
The event forms part of the wider Art On Your Doorstep programme, which has bright meticulous reproductions of 30 iconic National Gallery paintings to public spaces across Croydon until 5 July.
You can find the Art On Our Doorstep: Croydon’s Contemporary Art Fair at Whitgift Centre, Turf Studios and Croydon North End, CR0 1LP from 12th-14th June.
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