Yale Center for British Art welcomes visitors back beginning September 25

NEW HAVEN, CT (September 22, 2020)—On September 25, the Yale Center for British Art will reopen to the public with limited capacity and new safety measures. The Center’s new temporary hours are from noon to 7 pm on Fridays and from noon to 4 pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Visitors may reserve a free timed-entry ticket on the Center’s website. A limited number of walk-up tickets may be available on a first-come-first-serve basis. It is highly recommended to reserve tickets in advance.

In addition to reducing the building capacity to less than 25 percent, the Center is requiring that all staff and visitors (ages two and older) wear a mask and practice physical distancing. Visitors will be welcomed and checked in at the 1080 Chapel Street entrance, and they will exit through the Museum Shop on High Street. There will be one-way paths throughout the galleries to facilitate physical distancing. The Center also has implemented more frequent cleaning measures and adopted additional safety protocols for visitors and staff, which are outlined in detail online.

“Since the Center closed in March, my colleagues and I have been waiting to reopen! We are eager to welcome back visitors from the city of New Haven, the Yale community, and beyond” said Courtney J. Martin, director of the Yale Center for British Art. “We have worked carefully to reopen our building so that visitors can enjoy our collections in a safe environment. We will continue with our virtual programming, including discussions with some of today’s most influential artists.”

The Yale University Art Gallery, located across the street from the Center, will also be reopening with similar hours. Please visit artgallery.yale.edu for more information.

The Yale Center for British Art will open its galleries in phases, beginning with its collections display, Britain in the World, which is on view on the second and fourth floors. Special exhibitions will open over the fall and spring semesters in the following order:

Contemporary Designer Bookbindings from The Collection of Neale and Margaret Albert
Through November 29, 2020

Featuring the work of designer bookbinder George Kirkpatrick (born 1938), one of the most imaginative artists represented in the collection of Neale and Margaret Albert, this display also includes exemplars by other noted designer bookbinders working today, such as Susan Allix, Hannah Brown, Gabrielle Fox, Michael Wilcox, and Robert Wu.

Many of these bindings were especially commissioned by Neale Albert (Yale JD 1961), who is an active supporter of this often underappreciated aspect of the book arts. Albert was elected in 2014 as an honorary fellow of Designer Bookbinders, the principal society in Great Britain devoted to artistic bookbinding. All of the books included in the exhibition are a promised gift to the Center from Neale and Margaret Albert, who have kindly extended the run of the exhibition through November 29, 2020.

Love, Life, Death, and Desire: An Installation of the Center’s Collections
October 1, 2020–February 28, 2021

In 1991, Damien Hirst presented In and Out of Love, his first solo exhibition in London. Taking up two floors of the Woodstock Street Gallery between June 21 and July 26, 1991, the exhibition comprised a room of live butterflies and an installation titled Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays. This installation was subsequently acquired by the Yale Center for British Art. To mark its thirtieth anniversary, In and Out of Love (Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays) is presented here alongside works of historic, modern, and contemporary art that address the core themes of Hirst’s work: love and death; beauty, desire, and suffering; permanence and fragility; the symbolic and the real; the relationships between people, places and things; and the boundary between art and life.

Art in Focus: Women From the Center
January 14–May 2, 2021

This exhibition celebrates women artists in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Inspired by Yale University’s celebration of fifty years of coeducation in Yale College and 150 years of coeducation in Yale graduate programs, the display highlights women artists whose inventive art practices have enabled them to stake out space in the art world. The title for this exhibition references both the use of the collection of the Yale Center for British Art and Lucy Lippard’s influential collection of feminist essays, From the Center (1976).

Art in Focus is an annual initiative by members of the Center’s Student Guide Program, providing Yale undergraduates with curatorial experience and an introduction to all aspects of exhibition practice. The student curators include Emma Gray, SY ’21; Sunnie Liu, JE ’21; Annie Roberts, SY ’21; Christina Robertson, SM ’22; and Olivia Thomas, MC ’20.

The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby
January 21–May 2, 2021

This focused exhibition of works by the Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby (born 1983), Yale MFA 2011, is the final show in the series of three exhibitions curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als. Works are selected by Als in collaboration with the artist.

Akunyili Crosby is a leading contemporary artist whose work offers critical perspectives on postcolonial history and experience as well as transnational identities. She has been the subject of a sequence of high-profile and well-received solo exhibitions in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and will be the first graduate of the Yale School of Art to have a monographic show on view at the Center. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.”

About the Yale Center for British Art

The Center is a museum that houses the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, encompassing works in a range of media from the fifteenth century to the present. It offers exhibitions and programs year-round, including lectures, concerts, films, symposia, tours, and family events. Opened to the public in 1977, the Center’s core collection and landmark building—designed by architect Louis I. Kahn—were a gift to Yale University from the collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon. It is free and open to all. Visit the Center online at britishart.yale.edu, and connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube @yalebritishart. #YCBA