Art Fund, The Wild Escape launched at The Natural History Museum

BGUK_2553813 - Art Fund, The Wild Escape launched at The Natural History Museum: Artists and children at the launch of a major new national campaign to highlight Britain's biodiversity crisis. 500 museums across the UK and thousands of children are participating, led by national arts charity Art Fund, supported by Arts Council England, and in partnership with the National Trust, English Heritage, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and World Wildlife Fund UK. Supported by Arts Council England, the project aims to inspire hundreds of thousands of children to visit museums and respond creatively to the threat to the UK’s natural environment by looking for animals featured in museum collections and creating their own wildlife artworks. The children’s animals will be brought to life in a newly imagined epic-scale artwork, created by leading immersive games studio, PRELOADED, to be unveiled on Earth Day 2023, Saturday 22 April. Led by Art Fund, the project will bring together 500 museums across the country in partnership with the WWF, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the National Trust and English Heritage along with world-leading artists and environmentalists. It is one of the largest museum projects ever funded by Arts Council England. The Wild Escape is inspired by BBC One’s major forthcoming Wild Isles series presented by Sir David Attenborough. It is in partnership with BBC Bitesize, the free study resource for children, which will host films showing an artist making a work inspired by animals in the UK’s museum collections. The Wild Escape is open to every primary school age child to take part whether in class, through a visit to their local museum or online, from now to July. Hundreds of museums, galleries, and historic houses will host special activities for families connecting to the environment and biodiversity. It will create a new relationship between museums and the natural world aiming to shape the lives of the children who participate. Leading artists are also creating artworks based on animals in museum collections to inspire children to take part, including Es Devlin, Heather Phillipson, Rana Begum, Mollie Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Tai Shani, FKA Twigs, Claire Twomey, Mark Wallinger, Angela Palmer.