From the Director

January 2024

Dear Friends,

Here at the Yale Center for British Art, January is bright with the anticipation of the busy months ahead. December marked the close of two important exhibitions mounted in partnership with our neighbors at Yale: Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi—A Marvellous Entanglementco-organized with the Yale School of Architecture, brought record numbers of visitors to the Yale Architecture Gallery this autumn and the Yale University Art Gallery welcomed more than 170,600 visitors while In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art was on view. Twenty-seven works from our collection—by Mary Beale, John Constable, John Everett Millais, J. M. W. Turner, and others—remain on view across Chapel Street. These paintings are interspersed throughout the second-floor European galleries, where they underscore the links between Yale’s two art collections. 

My colleagues and I look forward to a robust schedule of in-person and online programs, new collaborative projects, off-site exhibitions, and preparations to reopen the museum in 2025. Our curatorial team is hard at work on a reimagined presentation of our collection. I know you will be as happy as I am to see our favorite works—as well as some remarkable new acquisitions—reinstalled in the beautifully refurbished galleries of our Louis I. Kahn building. 

 We are also planning several special exhibitions for our reopening year, including one that will celebrate the 250th anniversary of J. M. W. Turner’s birth, and another that will present drawings and paintings by contemporary artist Tracey Emin. An additional exhibition will highlight our museum’s collection of illustrations by Agostino Aglio, who contributed to the first modern exposition of ancient Mesoamerican art. We are excited to organize and host a major midcareer survey of work by Guyanese-British sculptor Hew Locke, as well.

Our newest publication is a thoughtfully reproduced facsimile of the last known intact sketchbook by Turner. The book also includes a new love poem by Emin, which adds to her distinctive body of text-based works of art drawn from her personal life. Here, she responds to Turner’s sketches and reiterates their shared connections to the seaside town of Margate. The book will be available to purchase from our online Museum Shop in February. 

Beginning in March, photographs taken by local public high school and college students participating in "The View from Here: Accessing Art Through Photography" will be displayed in the High Street windows of the museum. Now in its third year, this course aims to deepen young people’s interest in visual art by exposing them to the history, material, and practice of photography.  

Lynda Nead, Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, will give the 2024 Paul Mellon Lecture, “Pauline Boty: Women, Desire, and Image in Sixties Britain,” at Hastings Hall on April 3. The YCBA and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art established the Paul Mellon Lectures in 1994 to honor our shared founder. The biennial lectures are delivered in both London and New Haven by a distinguished historian of British art. Professor Nead’s series of talks began at the Victoria and Albert Museum last fall. 

We are collaborating with the Yale Department of the History of Art and Yale Peabody Museum to organize a graduate student symposium on April 26 that considers the proliferation of animal subjects in British art history through the lens of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of animal studies. Later in the semester, on May 10, we will partner with the Society of American Archivists to sponsor a symposium on museum archives. 

Among the online offerings planned for the spring are conversations with artists Lisa Brice, Sekai Machache, Eva Rothschild, and Caragh Thuring. Recordings of recent programs, including talks with Florian Idenberg and Jing Liu of SO-IL, Cornelia Parker, Kianja Strobert (Yale MFA 2006), and Daniel Weiss (Yale MBA 1985), are now available to watch on our website. Be sure to sign up for our e-newsletter, follow us on social media, and visit our website calendar for the latest information about additional programs and events. 

As always, I thank you for your support and hope to see you soon. 

Sincerely,
 

Courtney J. Martin Signature

Courtney J. Martin
Paul Mellon Director

Courtney J. Martin, photo by Mara Lavitt