This is one of the School Prints, commissioned and published by the Hepworth Wakefield. L Launched in 2018, School Prints is an ambitious five-year project to engage every primary school child in Wakefield District with contemporary art. Each year, the participating schools are gifted a set of limited-edition prints by leading contemporary artists for display in school and are supported with an in-depth engagement programme led by local artists to encourage creativity across the curriculum. Nicola Freeman, Director of Engagement & Learning at The Hepworth Wakefield, said: “The prominence and urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has brought into sharp focus the lack of diversity across the arts and museum sector”, and the artists were selected to increase diversity of representation. The Hepworth Wakefield scheme was inspired by the original School Prints initiative, a ground-breaking project set up in the 1940s whereby artists, including Henri Matisse, Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso, were commissioned to create prints specifically for schools to allow children to have direct access to high-quality art.

Alvaro Barrington was born in 1983, in Caracas, Venezuela, to Grenadian and Haitian parents and raised between the Caribbean and New York. Barrington’s practice explores interconnected histories of cultural production. About this print he has said: ‘I grew up with my grandmother. My mother had me as a teenager, and it was very common that a grandmother would raise their grandchildren. My grandma was very beautiful and someone I think about all the time. I made this drawing of my hands drawn as if they were her hands. When I was a kid, I wasn’t very well-behaved, and she used to pray for me. I remember thinking about her praying, and I think her prayers today make me want to be better, do better, make her proud. It’s a drawing to remind me of her prayers and of wanting to make her proud.’