NEW HAVEN, CONN.- The Yale Center for British Art will reopen to the public on March 29, 2025, following a two-year closure for a major conservation project that preserves the integrity of its iconic building, designed by the world-renowned architect Louis I. Kahn. Marking a new era for the Center, the reopening will feature a full reinstallationof its distinguished collection of British art, alongside two thought-provoking solo exhibitions: J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality and Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning.
Yale Center for British Art recently published a beautifully produced facsimile of the last known intact sketchbook by J. M. W. Turner. The volume is accompanied by a poem in which Tracey Emin (b. 1963) expresses her profound connection with Turner’s work.
“My colleagues and I are thrilled to welcome visitors back into the museum to enjoy our amazing collection newly installed within Kahn’s elegant skylit galleries,” said Richard Brodhead, Interim Director. “Having had the privilege of witnessing the evolution of the Center since it first opened to the public in 1977, I am eager to share the museum’s newest chapter with today’s audiences. Through the reconceived collection display, special exhibitions, and robust programming, students, faculty, schoolchildren, and the general public are invited to engage with our holdings in exciting ways.”
A Reimagined Collection
The reinstalled collection at the YCBA transforms the museum’s presentation of British art. For the first time, the display unites the historic and contemporary collections in an uninterrupted chronological sequence on the fourth floor. Spanning the sixteenth century to the present, the new installation creates a rich and nuanced narrative that reflects the complexities of British art, culture, and society. “As we inaugurate the next phase of the museum’s history, we are recentering the collection as a resource we want to share with our community and the world,” said Martina Droth, Deputy Director and Chief Curator. “The new hang tells a global and at times challenging history that shows British art is not an island story but an international story. Almost half of the works on view were made by artists not born in Britain or artists who left Britain to make their careers elsewhere.” The new installation presents global stories and influences, placing iconic works, such as John Constable’s paintings of rural England, alongside never-before exhibited works from the founding collection, such as William Daniell’s newly conserved A View in China: Cultivating the Tea Plant (ca. 1810). Other highlights include classic treasures by George Stubbs and Thomas Gainsborough alongside bold works by contemporary artists such as Cecily Brown, bridging centuries through shared themes and formal explorations.
Strategic new acquisitions allow the Center to show the vital role that women played in the history of British art, with major works by Mary Beale, Maria Spilsbury, and Emma Soyer, whose Young Mariner and Dog (1833) is the first of her works to be accessioned by a museum. The closure also provided an opportunity for the Center to undertake deep research on works in the founding collection, such as Isaac Sailmaker’s The Island of Barbados (ca. 1694), in order to understand their place in Britain’s complex history of imperial expansion and often ruthless exploitation.
Opening up the interior vistas that are made possible by Kahn’s flexible design for the galleries, the rehang encourages visitors to find their own paths through the collection and discover connections across time and place, inviting both new and returning audiences to engage with British art in novel ways. Building on relationships fostered in New Haven’s libraries, community centers, and classrooms during the closure, the Center will offer educational programs that integrate the perspectives of multiple communities into the museum space and reenergize the in-gallery experience to demonstrate the multiplicity of meanings that can be found within the history of British art.
Major Exhibitions: Turner and Emin
The Yale Center for British Art will celebrate its reopening with two landmark exhibitions: J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality and Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning. Although born almost two hundred years apart, J. M .W. Turner and Tracey Emin share an understanding of the expressive potential of paint. Their distinctive ways of looking at the world were shaped by the seaside town of Margate, on England’s eastern coast, where both spent formative periods of their lives.
J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Realitymarks the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth and offers a rare opportunity to explore the incredible range of Turner’s works in the Center’s collection, the largest holdings outside the United Kingdom. The collection includes nearly three thousand works by and after the artist, including fourteen oil paintings, along with hundreds of drawings, prints, and watercolors.
The exhibition traces the unique approach to landscape art that Turner developed over his nearly sixty-year career, transforming the conventional naturalism of traditional painting into nearly abstract expressions of form and color. From his early topographical views to his later atmospheric works, rendered in delicate watercolors and loosely painted oils, Turner reinvented landscape traditions in ways that continue to resonate with audiences today. In addition to showcasing his skill in capturing brilliant light effects, the exhibition will present the full complexity of Turner’s output, with its mesmerizing combination of visionary Romanticism and deep awareness of the tragic realities of human life.
“We are delighted to present an exhibition about Turner that is drawn entirely from our collection,” said Lucinda Lax, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture. “The Center’s collection represent every phase of Turner’s career and touch on every medium that he used, enabling us to show the artist’s extraordinary inventiveness and the unparalleled changes in his artistic approach over the course of his lifetime.” Romance and Reality also highlights the artist’s remarkable sketching practices and features one of the jewels of the museum’s collection, his 1845 “Channel Sketchbook.” Used on Turner’s last journey across the English Channel, it contains views of the coastline around Margate, where he spent much time during his childhood and old age.
Romance and Reality introduces an exhibition program newly focused on revealing to audiences the depth and breadth of the museum’s holdings. The show will be accompanied by a monograph that is the first in a new series of books on key artists in the YCBA collections.
Contemporary artist Tracey Emin is the focus of I Loved You Until The Morning, the first major museum exhibition of her work in North America. The displayforegrounds Emin’s practice as a painter, emphasizing her primary medium over the last two decades. Many of the paintings on view have never been shown in a museum. Emin explores deeply personal experiences to confront timely issues about female sexuality and women’s bodies. Her paintings lay bare intimate and private experiences that veer from the prosaic to the most profound and life-affirming aspects of being a woman. The exhibition’s immersive design draws visitors into the emotional world of Emin’s art before they even enter the museum: a bold new neon work in the Entrance Court, created for this show, will be visible from the street to passersby twenty-four hours a day.
By contextualizing Emin’s work within the Center, the exhibition invites audiences to see her as a pioneering artist, distinct from her well-known public persona in Britain. Through her raw portrayal of the female form, Emin challenges traditional depictions of women in art, centering instead on the authenticity of lived experience.
A Modernist Icon Preserved
The Center will reopen after a two-year closure, during which the museum carried out crucial conservation work to preserve Louis I. Kahn’s architectural masterpiece for future generations.
The final building designed by Kahn, the Center demonstrates his distinctive modernist style as well as his singular architectural philosophy that interior space is defined by the interplay of structure and light. With this project, the museum aimed to replace many of the original building materials, taking advantage of new advances in technology since the 1970s while preserving the aesthetic qualities of Kahn’s design.
Exterior improvements include a new liquid membrane roof and the replacement of the 224 original acrylic skylights with more resilient polycarbonate domes that maintain Kahn’s iconic design while improving durability, weather resistance, and energy efficiency.
Additionally, the museum installed new laylight cassettes that were fabricated to match the original design. Positioned below the skylight domes, the cassettes diffuse sunlight entering the gallery space, protecting the collection while creating an environment for viewing works of art that is responsive to the changing nature of daylight. Following thorough analysis, the Center decided to incorporate a removable light-reducing film into the cassette systems. The film will reduce light exposure levels to better align with modern art conservation standards while remaining true to Kahn’s vision for the aesthetic quality and variation of daylight inside the building.
The Center also invested in a more energy-efficient lighting system, made possible in part by generous funding from the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative. The original halogen lighting system has been converted to LED, significantly reducing energy consumption and ensuring a more sustainable future for the museum. This conversion included replacing more than 6,500 linear feet of track throughout the building and retrofitting more than 600 fixtures. New lights were carefully selected to match the design of the original fixtures.
Conservation Project Background
The project builds upon more than a decade of research on the history of the design, construction, and renovation of the museum’s landmark building, which was published in 2011 as Louis Kahn and the Yale Center for British Art: A Conservation Plan. The book was authored by Peter Inskip and Stephen Gee, in association with Constance Clement, former deputy director of the museum, and was published by the Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press.
The previous phase of conservation, undertaken in 2015–16, focused on interior refurbishments, improvements to patron amenities, and essential systems upgrades.
For the current project, the Center has benefited from the expertise and dedication of its partners in the Yale Office of Facilities; C-White Electric; EwingCole; Knight Architecture, LLC; Lighting Services Inc; Southport Engineering Associates; Turner Construction Company; and Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates Inc, as well as numerous other collaborators.
The Building
The Yale Center for British Art was designed by the internationally acclaimed American architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974). Located across the street from his first major commission, the Yale University Art Gallery (1953), the Center is Kahn’s final work and was completed in 1977, three years after his death. The exterior of matte steel and reflective glass confers a monumental presence in downtown New Haven. The geometric four-floor interior, designed around two courtyards, uses a restrained palette of natural materials, including travertine, white oak, and Belgian linen. Kahn succeeded in creating intimate galleries where one can view objects in diffused natural light. The building’s design, materials, and skylit rooms provide an environment for works of art that is simple and dignified.
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