Established | 1993 |
---|---|
Location | St Ives, Cornwall, England, UK |
Coordinates | 50°12′53″N5°28′57″W / 50.21472°N 5.48250°W |
Visitors | 278,747 (2019) [1] |
Website | www.tate.org.uk/stives |
Tate | |
Tate St Ives is an art gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, England, exhibiting work by modern British artists with links to the St Ives area. The Tate also took over management of another museum in the town, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, in 1980.
The Tate St Ives was built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks and looks over Porthmeor beach. In 2015, it received funding for an expansion, doubling the size of the gallery, and closed in October 2015 for refurbishment. The gallery re-opened in October 2017 and is among the most visited attractions in the UK. [1]
In 1980, Tate group started to manage the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, dedicated to the life and work of the renowned St Ives artist. The group decided to open a museum in the town, to showcase local artists, especially those already held in their collection. [2]
In 1988, the group purchased a former gasworks and commissioned architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev, to design a building for the gallery in a similar style to the gas works. [3] The building began in 1991, funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the Henry Moore Foundation and donations from the public. [3] It included a rotunda at the centre of the gallery, looking over Porthmeor Beach and was completed in 1993. The gallery opened in June 1993, the second of the Tate's regional galleries after Tate Liverpool, receiving more than 120,000 visitors before the end of the year. [2]
In 1999, to celebrate the solar eclipse (as St Ives was predicted to be the first British town to witness the event), Tate St Ives held an exhibition called As Dark as Light, exhibiting work from Garry Fabian Miller, Gia Edzveradze and Yuko Shiraishi alongside art from local schoolchildren. [4]
In 2012, Tate St Ives ran a competition for a design team to build a major extension, which was won by Jamie Fobert Architects. [5] In January 2015, the Tate St Ives received £3.9 million to contribute towards the new extension, [6] with the intention of doubling the available space in order to accommodate tourists throughout the year, without having to close between exhibitions. The building contract was awarded to BAM Construct UK, who would be adding a 1,200 square metres (13,000 sq ft) extension designed by Jamie Fobert, with the original architect's involvement in works to the existing building. [7] [8] The Tate St Ives was closed in October 2015 for these works and remained closed for two years. [9]
Tate St Ives reopened in October 2017, [10] with the inaugural exhibition in the new 500m2 gallery a solo show by contemporary sculptor Rebecca Warren, 'All that heaven allows'. [11]
In July 2018, Tate St. Ives won the Art Fund Museum of the Year Prize, beating the other shortlisted museums (the Brooklands Museum, the Ferens Art Gallery, Glasgow Women's Library and the Postal Museum, London) to the £100,000 prize. [12] [13] Later that month, the Royal Institute of British Architects announced that the new Tate building had reached the shortlist for the 2018 Stirling Prize. [14] It was beaten by the Bloomberg Building in London, by Foster + Partners. [15] In 2019, Tate St Ives won a Civic Trust Award. [16]
Notable exhibitions prior to the refurbishment include:
Since the refurbishment, Tate St Ives has showcased the following exhibitions:
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
St Ives is a seaside town, civil parish and port in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The town lies north of Penzance and west of Camborne on the coast of the Celtic Sea. In former times, it was commercially dependent on fishing. The decline in fishing, however, caused a shift in commercial emphasis, and the town is now primarily a popular seaside resort, notably achieving the title of Best UK Seaside Town from the British Travel Awards in both 2010 and 2011. St Ives was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1639. St Ives has become renowned for its number of artists. It was named best seaside town of 2007 by The Guardian newspaper.
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.
Kettle's Yard is an art gallery and house in Cambridge, England. The director of the art gallery is Andrew Nairne. Both the house and gallery reopened in February 2018 after an expansion of the facilities.
Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal. Responding to the scientific and political revolutions of his age, Gabo led an eventful and peripatetic life, moving to Berlin, Paris, Oslo, Moscow, London, and finally the United States, and within the circles of the major avant-garde movements of the day, including Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, de Stijl and the Abstraction-Création group. Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space—"released from any closed volume" or mass—and time. He famously explored the former idea in his Linear Construction works (1942-1971)—used nylon filament to create voids or interior spaces as "concrete" as the elements of solid mass—and the latter in his pioneering work, Kinetic Sculpture (1920), often considered the first kinetic work of art.
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts.
George Peter Lanyon was a British painter of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. Lanyon was one of the most important artists to emerge in post-war Britain. Despite his early death at the age of forty-six he achieved a body of work that is amongst the most original and important reappraisals of modernism in painting to be found anywhere. Combining abstract values with radical ideas about landscape and the figure, Lanyon navigated a course from Constructivism through Abstract Expressionism to a style close to Pop. He also made constructions, pottery and collage.
Sir Alan Bowness CBE was a British art historian, art critic, and museum director. He was the director of the Tate Gallery between 1980 and 1988.
Linder Sterling, commonly known as Linder, is a British artist known for her photography, radical feminist photomontage and confrontational performance art. She was also the former front-woman of Manchester based post-punk group Ludus. In 2017, Sterling was honored with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.
John Clayworth Spencer Wells was an artist and maker of relief constructions, associated with the St Ives group.
The St Ives School refers to a group of artists living and working in the Cornish town of St Ives. The term is often used to refer to the 20th century groups which sprung up after the First World War around such artists as Borlase Smart, however there was considerable artistic activity there from the late 19th Century onwards.
Sir Norman Robert Reid was an arts administrator and painter. He served as the Director of the Tate Gallery from 1964 to 1979.
Huguette Caland was a Lebanese painter, sculptor and fashion designer known for her erotic abstract paintings and body landscapes. Based out of Los Angeles, her art was displayed in numerous exhibitions and museums around the world.
Firstsite is a visual arts organisation based in Colchester, Essex, which opened in 1993 as Colchester and District Visual Arts Trust, changing its name to Firstsite in 1995. Its current building was opened in 2011. It was the national Art Fund's Museum of the Year in 2021. The building Firstsite occupies as a tenant was designed by Rafael Viñoly and the freehold is retained by Colchester Council. The building is situated in Colchester's "Cultural Quarter" near The Minories, Colchester, fifteen Queen Street, the Norman Colchester Castle, the Natural History Museum, Hollytrees Museum and Colchester's Roman Wall.
Margaret Nairne Mellis was a Scottish artist, one of the early members and last survivors of the group of modernist artists that gathered in St Ives, in Cornwall, in the 1940s. She and her first husband, Adrian Stokes, played an important role in the rise of St Ives as a magnet for artists. She later married Francis Davison, also an artist, and became a mentor to the young Damien Hirst.
Veronica Maudlyn Ryan is a Montserrat-born British sculptor. She moved to London with her parents when she was an infant and now lives between New York and Bristol. In December 2022, Ryan won the Turner Prize for her 'really poetic' work.
Anne Barlow is a curator and director in the field of international contemporary art, and is currently Director of Tate St Ives, Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018. There she directs and oversees the artistic vision and programme, including temporary exhibitions, collection displays, artist residencies, new commissions, and a learning and research programme. At Tate St Ives, Barlow has curated solo exhibitions of work by artists including: Outi Pieski (2024); Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (2023); Burçak Bingöl (2022); Prabhakar Pachpute (2022); Thảo Nguyên Phan (2022); Petrit Halilaj (2021); Haegue Yang (2020); Otobong Nkanga (2019); Huguette Caland (2019); Amie Siegel (2018) and Rana Begum (2018). She was also co-curator of "Naum Gabo: Constructions for Real Life" (2020) and collaborating curator with Castello di Rivoli, Turin for Anna Boghiguian at Tate St Ives (2019).
James Earl Fobert, is a British architect and designer.
Petrit Halilaj is a Kosovar visual artist living and working among Germany, Kosovo, and Italy. The name "Petrit" literally means "Falcon". His work is based on documents, stories, and memories related to the history of Kosovo.