ACE Collection to be shared across England

Arts Council England (ACE) has chosen three partner galleries around England to curate exhibitions of artworks drawn from its Collection over the next three years.

£1.8m has been awarded to Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, Birmingham Museums Trust and The Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool. Together with existing partner Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the galleries will curate twenty-four exhibitions of modern and contemporary art between 2016 and 2019. The funding is aimed at giving the new partners “additional capacity to make a step change in their regional and national profile,” enabling them to attract new audiences and engage with children and young people.

Established 70 years ago, the Arts Council Collection is the UK’s most widely seen collection of modern and contemporary art. It contains nearly 8,000 works by over 2,000 artists including Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Richard Hamilton. The work is loaned out to a wide range of exhibitions across England each year. In 2015 over 1,800,000 visitors attended an exhibition that included items from the Collection.

The 70th anniversary celebrations include eight new commissions that will go on display across the UK throughout 2016.

The first partner exhibitions curated from the Arts Council Collection will take place at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, starting in March, with ‘At Home’, exploring the central role of the home in our lives, followed by ‘Transparency’, considering the multiple meanings of the word.