The Craft Schools Behind Mohammed Jameel’s V&A Anniversary
At the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 20th anniversary reception for The Jameel Gallery, the most striking scene wasn’t a speech. It was the demonstration tables set around the room, where alumni of the Jameel Houses of Traditional Arts worked ceramics, wood inlay and gypsum carving live for guests.
The schools, run through a partnership between Community Jameel and The King’s Foundation that Mohammed Jameel helped establish, have produced training centers in Cairo, Jeddah and on the King’s Foundation’s Dumfries House estate in Scotland for nearly 20 years. He attended the reception where those same alumni demonstrated their skills, a pairing organizers clearly intended.
Jacqueline Farrell, executive director for education at The King’s Foundation, said having a Jameel House on-site at Dumfries House matters because the estate educates more than 10,000 students annually in traditional and sustainable skills.
Training Craftspeople, Not Just Preserving Objects
Community Jameel’s work in the region pairs that kind of craft preservation with practical job creation, a priority the organization has linked directly to youth employment in the Arab world. The reception drew Fady Jameel, Hassan Jameel, Hisham Hamza and Ghada Alsammanoudi, alongside Emily Cherrington of The King’s Foundation.
Twenty years after a single gallery reopened with roughly 400 restored objects, the broader project now looks less like an exhibit and more like a training pipeline, one the reception’s live demonstrations made hard to miss.