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In this uncertain new era of social distancing and self-isolation, collections, museums and galleries all across the UK have made the responsible decision to close their doors to the public. For most of these institutions, many months and years of hard work and preparation have gone into developing an exhibition program, exhibition or display, meaning that this temporary cancellation of culture weighs heavily on those working diligently in the museum sector.

Here's a breakdown of public collection and museum closure notifications, as well as the postponed exhibitions you can still read about online, plus more detail about how you can support collections. We will continue to update this page at the request of collections. It is always worth following the links below for up-to-date information.

In the meantime, find out more about how Art UK proposes to help museums and collections.

Featured regions:

England: London

England: Midlands and East

England: North

England: South and West

Northern Ireland

Scotland

Wales

England: London

Foundling Museum

The Foundling Museum will remain closed to the public until 1st May.

Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media

Garden Museum

The Garden Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.

Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939. This exhibition is postponed until 3rd November 2020.

The golden age of garden painting will be celebrated in this new selling exhibition presented in partnership with Liss Llewellyn. 'Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939' will show over 20 artists including Charles Mahoney, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Evelyn Dunbar, John Nash, Nancy Nicholson, Kenneth Rowntree and Winifred Knights.

National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery is closed until further notice.

Cecil Beaton, Bright Young Things

Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton 1937

Christian Bérard (1902–1949)

National Portrait Gallery, London

David Hockney: Drawing from Life

Read Art UK's stories on David Hockney, 'David Hockney: swimming pools and suburbia' and 'Farah Nayeri on David Hockney's 'Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy'.'

National Gallery

The National Gallery is closed until 4th May.

Artemisia

In this first major exhibition of Artemisia Gentileschi's work in the UK, her best-known paintings including her celebrated self-portraits and Judith beheading Holofernes will be on display. Read Art UK's story, 'Artemisia Gentileschi: brilliant Baroque icon'.

Stay tuned for Art UK's upcoming interview with the show's curator, Letizia Treves.

Titian: Love, Desire, Death

Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria c.1615–1617

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654 or after)

The National Gallery, London

Royal Academy of Arts

The Royal Academy is temporarily closed until further notice.

Picasso and Paper

This exhibition features Pablo Picasso's creative process first-hand in remarkable documentary footage of the artist at work, studies for Guernica, and sketchbooks where the seeds of revolutionary masterpieces first took shape, including Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Seated Woman (Femme assise)

Seated Woman (Femme assise) c.1923–1925

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)

Léon Spilliaert

Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpiece from the Ordrupgaard Collection

Summer Exhibition 2020

Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.

Cars: Accelerating the Modern World

Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk

Read Art UK's story, 'From Kyoto to London: keeping up with the kimono'.

Renaissance Watercolours: from Dürer to Van Dyck. This exhibition is cancelled.

William Morris Gallery

The William Morris Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.

Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper

Known for his heroic images of black subjects, American artist Kehinde Wiley mixes photorealistic portraiture with highly patterned backdrops, referencing the floral motifs of William Morris.

Tate Britain

Tate Britain is temporarily closed until further notice.

Steve McQueen: Year 3

British Baroque: Power and Illusion

Aubrey Beardsley

Messalina and her Companion

Messalina and her Companion 1895

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898)

Tate

Sir John Soane Museum

Sir John Soane Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.

Langlands & Bell: Degrees of Truth

Stanley Spencer Gallery, Berkshire

The Stanley Spencer Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.

Love, Art, Loss: The Wives of Stanley Spencer

This exhibition explores how Spencer's paintings convey the joys, sorrows and complexities of his relationships with his two wives, Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece. Read Art UK's story, 'Patricia Preece and Dorothy Hepworth: love, art and deception'.

England: Midlands and East

Cambridge

Fitzwilliam Museum

The Fitzwilliam Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.

Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800

A multi-sensory exhibition serving up hidden and newly conserved treasures, plus historical reconstructions of a Jacobean sugar banquet and a Georgian confectioner's workshop. Read Art UK's story 'Food and Feasting in European art history'.

Still Life with Fruit and a Vase of Flowers

Still Life with Fruit and a Vase of Flowers

Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750)

The Fitzwilliam Museum

Virtue, Vice & the Senses: Prints 1540–1660

Fans Unfolded: Conserving the Lennox-Boyd Collection

Sharpening Perceptions: How to Copy a Masterpiece

Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge

Kettle's Yard is temporarily closed until further notice.

Linderism

In the museum's announcement, they have asked for support via the shop or donations.

Birmingham

Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is temporarily closed until further notice.

Cézanne and the Modern French Print

Maternal Bonds: Images of Motherhood

The Big Trees

The Big Trees c.1904

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)

National Galleries of Scotland

The New Art Gallery Walsall, Birmingham

20 for 2020

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery are temporarily closed until further notice.

Webster and Horsfall: 300 Years of Innovation

Leicester

New Walk Museum & Art Gallery

The New Walk Museum and Art Gallery are temporarily closed until further notice.

Dissent & Displacement: A Modern Story

Drawing inspiration from the museum's German Expressionist collections and the artist's refugee heritage, printmaker Monica Petzal tackles themes of opposition, persecution and persistence.

Unlocked 2

A split-site exhibition at New Walk Museum & Art Gallery and Soft Touch Arts that looks at prison life, created by men serving sentences at HMP Leicester and HMP Stocken.

England: North

Manchester

Manchester Art Gallery

The Manchester Art Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.

Derek Jarman: Protest!

A major retrospective of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century British culture, this exhibition focuses on Derek Jarman's practice as a painter, filmmaker, writer, set-designer, and political activist. Read 'The Last of England: saving Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage.'

Avebury Series II, 1973

Avebury Series II, 1973 1976

Derek Jarman (1942–1994)

Derby Museums

The Whitworth, University of Manchester

The Whitworth is temporarily closed until further notice.

Utopias

Influenced by Thomas More's Utopia, this exhibition crosses genres, media and timeframes to provide a playful and provocative framework for probing how Britain's literary and visual culture has perpetuated an idea of a utopian society that fosters nostalgic yearnings for a seemingly lost past.

Preston

The Harris Museum and Art Gallery

The Harris Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.

The Artful Line: Drawings from the Harris Collection and The Courtauld Gallery

Sheffield

Weston Park Museum, Museums Sheffield

Weston Park Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.

Loved & Lost

Created by photographer Simon Bray after the death of his father, this project invites people to find a family photograph, then return to the location to re-create it and record a conservation about the experience.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is temporarily closed until further notice.

Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945

The first extensive study of post-war British sculpture by women in the UK. Spanning more than seventy years and exploring the work of fifty sculptors, this exhibition provides a radical recalibration, addressing the many accounts of British sculpture that have marginalised women or airbrushed their work out of the art historical canon altogether. It features sculptors such as Phyllida Barlow, Kim Lim, Rana Begum, Cornelia Parker, Sarah Lucas and Barbara Hepworth.

Ultimate Form (from 'The Family of Man')

Ultimate Form (from 'The Family of Man') 1970

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Brian Fell: Steelworks

See collages and constructions in steel, card and wire that reveal an artist who thinks by making, and is inspired by engineering, architecture, nature and music.

The Hepworth Wakefield

The Hepworth Wakefield Garden has remained open. Read their public statement about closure.

Bill Brandt / Henry Moore

This pairing of the famed photographer alongside the great sculptor looks at their shared interests in the themes of labour, society, industry, landscape and the human body.

York

York Art Gallery

York Art Gallery and Garden temporarily closed until further notice.

Harland Miller: York, So Good They Named It Once

New and existing works represent the artist's relationship to York, the city in which he grew up, as well as making wider references to the culture and geography of Yorkshire.

Newcastle

Laing Art Gallery

The Laing Art Gallery is temporarily closed until 1st May (to be confirmed).

Watercolour at War

This exhibition critically examines why artists have chosen to use watercolour. During the First and Second World Wars, war artists used watercolour out of necessity. The medium is portable, adaptable and quicker-drying than oil paint meaning that they could work at speed to capture what was happening around them. The series is inspired by the Laing's recent acquisition of Edward Burra's Landscape with Red Wheels.

England: South and West

Brighton

Brighton Museum

All Brighton Museum venues are temporarily closed until further notice.

Anita Corbin: 100 First Women Portraits

Anita Corbin has photographed 100 pioneering women of the twenty-first century, spanning an impressive record of achievement, from beatboxing to bomb detection.

Queer the Pier

Eastbourne

Towner Eastbourne

Towner Eastbourne is temporarily closed until further notice.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: This whole time there were no landmines

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a Turner Prize-winning artist based in Beirut whose work looks into the political effects of listening, using various kinds of audio to explore its effects on human rights and law.

Alan Davie and David Hockney: Early Works

Organised by the Hepworth Wakefield, this show traces the parallel paths of two key post-war painters, and their shared preoccupations with passion, love, sex and poetry.

Hampshire

Chawton House

Chawton House is closed but the gardens remain open to visitors.

Man Up: Women who Stepped into a Man's World

Chawton House's 2020 exhibition highlights stories of women who stepped into male roles. By picking up a pen, pistol or sword, they broke with convention to survive and thrive.

Chichester

Pallant House Gallery

Pallant House Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.

A Life in Art: The Muriel Wilson Bequest

Discover prized works from the curator and collector Muriel Wilson, an early supporter of artists including Peter Blake, Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson.

Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain

Swindon

Swindon Museum and Art Gallery

Pop and Prosperity: 1960s British Art from the Swindon Collection

This exhibition explores the impact of popular culture and society on British art in the 1960s, and features work by Howard Hodgkin, Michael Craig-Martin and Mary Fedden

Art on Tour: Highlights from the Swindon Collection of Modern British Art

The exhibition is part of Art on Tour 2020, a project which aims to take more of Swindon's art collection out of storage, and share it with more people in more places throughout the year.  

Oxford

Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean is temporarily closed until further notice.

Young Rembrandt

Beginning with his earliest known paintings, prints and drawings made in the mid-1620s, and ending at the moment he rockets to stardom in Amsterdam in the mid-1630s, this exhibition charts Rembrandt van Rijn's astonishing transformation.

Head of a Bearded Man

Head of a Bearded Man

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) (workshop of)

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Cai Guo-Qiang: Gunpowder art

Mediterranean Threads

Incredible imagination and technical prowess can be found in these highlights from the collection's eighteenth and nineteenth-century Greek embroideries.

Southhampton

Southampton City Art Gallery

Southampton City Art Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.

John Hitchens: Aspects of Landscape

Created over a period of more than five decades, this exhibition follows the artist's journey from early descriptive paintings to increasingly abstract ways of interpreting landscape.

Bournemouth

Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum

Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum is temporarily closed until 31st May.

Beyond the Brotherhood

An exhibition highlighting the importance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its influence on artistic developments including Realism, Aestheticism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau.

Venus Verticordia

Venus Verticordia 1864–1868

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)

Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum

Bristol

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery is temporarily closed but will reopen on 1st May.

Hinamatsuri: Japanese Dolls Festival

Tate St Ives

Tate St Ives is temporarily closed until further notice.

Haegue Yang

A major display of existing and new work by the South Korean artist renowned for using industrial and everyday materials and craft-based procedures to create creature-like sculptures.

Northern Ireland

Belfast

Ulster Museum

Ulster Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.

Ursula Burke

Working in porcelain sculpture, embroidery and drawing, much of Ursula Burke's art practice deals with issues of representation and identity, in both social and political spheres.

Naughton Gallery at Queen's University Belfast

Naughton Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.

Fire in the Middle: Miguel Martin

Scotland

Aberdeen

Aberdeen City Council

Exhibitions at Aberdeen City Council are closed until further notice.

Haroon Mirza: Waves and Forms

The first major solo show of Haroon Mirza's work in Scotland highlights the artist's ongoing exploration of waveforms and interest in disciplines including physics, shamanism and artificial intelligence.

Edinburgh

National Museum of Scotland

The National Museum of Scotland is temporarily closed until further notice.

The Declaration of Arbroath

To mark the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath the famous document goes on public display for the first time in 15 years.

Legacies of Empire

An exhibition telling the stories behind objects derived from British military campaigns in Africa and India which are held by national and military museums in the UK.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

All of the Scottish National Galleries are temporarily closed until further notice.

Beyond Realism: Dada and Surrealism

Featuring works by artists such as Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.

The Old Maids

The Old Maids 1947

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Glasgow

Gallery of Modern Art

The Gallery of Modern Art is temporarily closed until further notice.

Hal Fischer: Gay Semiotics and Other Works

A display of photographic works by the American artist, who documented the gay male culture of San Francisco in the late 1970s.

Hunterian Art Gallery

The Hunterian Art Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.

A Curator's Choice

Recently retired Hunterian curator Dr Peter Black picks out works by major artists, past and present, including Peter Paul Rubens, Lucian Freud, and William Gear.

Wales

Aberystwyth

Aberystwyth University School of Art Gallery

Aberystwyth Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.

Another Line to Follow

This exhibition celebrates the ongoing friendship and collaboration between artists with a shared interested in abstraction and who are connected to Aberystwyth University, having met while teaching or studying.

Cardiff

National Museum Cardiff

The National Museum Cardiff is temporarily closed until further notice.

Becoming Richard Burton

This show features Burton's diaries, papers and personal objects, follow the remarkable story of how a boy from Pontrhydyfen and Taibach, Port Talbot, became the international star of stage and screen.

Lydia Figes, Content Editor at Art UK