Wednesday 18th February 2015
Graphics workshop for students 3pm The Glass Tank
An evening with George McBean, The Insurgent Artist 7pm The Glass Tank
To reserve your free ticket for the talk and Q&A with George McBean please email Joanna Walker, Glass Tank Curator.

"Imagine a street artist who draws reasonable portraits and who gathers a crowd to watch him sketch… then ship this artist into a refugee camp in Somalia and ask him to draw the people he sees, doing things that will help them save their children’s lives. Crowds gather round and the artist’s skill suddenly becomes as important as medicine." George McBean.

George McBean is an animator and illustrator, born in Scotland in 1948. He retired as Head of UNICEF’s Graphic’s section dealing with Animation for Children’s Rights and continued working on occasional assignments in East Africa. His research into Visual Literacy among rural populations in Nepal has been highlighted in the New Internationalist and was described in the book 'People Pictures and Power’, Bob Linney 1991 - Macmillan-Talc as “the most important visual literacy study ever done”. He was key to forming one of UNICEF's most successful partnerships with more than 100 animation studios worldwide, including Disney, Pixar, Warner Bros, Dreamworks, Hanna Barbera, Cartoon Network. 

His designs and animated film productions have been distributed world-wide by the United Nations. He has given talks on his work at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and at the Animation Workshop in Viborg Denmark.

His exhibition, The Insurgent Artist, is in The Glass Tank at Oxford Brookes University until 27th February 2015 and the exhibition programme can be downloaded here.