LONDON.- The Art Fund announced this evening that the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London has won the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2013. The £10,000 Clore Award for Learning has been given to The Hepworth Wakefield. Ian Hislop announced the winners during tonight’s award ceremony held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The winners were announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.

Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund and chair of the judges, said: “Despite the prevailing concern about public investment and arts funding in the UK, the ten finalists for the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year have set world-class standards. Important and beautiful collections and their visiting publics are being brilliantly served across the country and the Prize intends to draw attention to this national success story.”

About the winning museums, he went on to say: “The William Morris Gallery is truly Museum of the Year. Its extraordinary collections, beautifully presented, draw the visitor engagingly through Morris’s life and work and through the building itself. Setting the highest standards of curatorship, and reaching out impressively to its local community, it offers a memorable way of experiencing art of the highest quality in the context of a great historic personality.

The integration of curatorial and learning programmes – which so many museums attempt – has rarely been achieved so completely and impressively as at The Hepworth Wakefield. It is educational, aspirational, and inspirational to the core.”

The William Morris Gallery
Completely refurbished following £5 million of investment, the William Morris Gallery is the only public space devoted to the life, work and legacy of William Morris: designer, artist, writer, thinker and father of the modern arts and crafts movement. Home to the British artist, his widowed mother and eight siblings from 1848 until 1856, the Grade II listed Georgian house is set in Lloyd Park in North East London. The museum showcases the breadth of Morris’s extraordinary vision, guiding visitors through his work, art and philosophy while offering innovative displays in a new temporary exhibition space, complementing the permanent collection. Transformed from local treasure to world-class visitor attraction, in its first six months the Gallery has welcomed over 80,000 visitors and has engaged thousands of schoolchildren, inspiring the next generation with an understanding of design and creativity. The Gallery forms an important cornerstone of Walthamstow Forest’s economic and artistic regeneration, setting the standard for ambitious plans to make the area a better place for its community of 250,000 people.

The Hepworth Wakefield
The Hepworth Wakefield is home to the city’s art collection and the Hepworth Family gift, which consists of over 44 prototypes in plaster and aluminium by Barbara Hepworth. In addition, the gallery holds a series of her drawings and a large group of lithographs and screenprints. Also displaying exhibitions by contemporary artists, the gallery is the largest purpose-built exhibition space outside London. 2012 was The Hepworth Wakefield’s first full year its innovative and far-ranging public programme continued to reach new audiences, from Zombie Walks to events with London 2012 Olympic hopefuls. The gallery’s permanent collection of over 5,000 works of art grew with its first contemporary art acquisition: Eva Rothschild’s ‘Wandering Palm’. 2012 saw the development of a cultural tourism partnership between The Hepworth Wakefield, the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Art Gallery and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. As a result, the ‘Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle’ launched in early 2013.

The winners were chosen by an independent panel of judges chaired by Art Fund director, Stephen Deuchar. The judges were Daily Telegraph’s Arts Editor in Chief Sarah Crompton, writer and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, Tristram Hunt MP and the artist Bob and Roberta Smith.

Judges’ initial reactions after their visits
Following his visit to the William Morris Gallery in May, Museum of the year judge Bob and Roberta Smith said: “We were presented by the William Morris Gallery with a tremendous story of optimism, hope and vision that equals Morris's own vision of celebrating human beings' creativity. In the current climate it's amazing to see a local authority realise the power of art in regenerating a borough."

Fellow Museum of the Year judge Sarah Crompton was struck by the ‘impressive’ education programme at The Hepworth Wakefield and said she was “thrilled to see how cleverly this relatively new gallery has built such an excellent programme around the core collection from their local heroine.”

The William Morris Gallery and The Hepworth Wakefield were two of ten finalists in the running for the prize, announced on 2 April 2013. They were (in alphabetical order):

· BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
· The Beaney, Canterbury
· Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
· The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield
· Horniman Museum & Gardens, London
· Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow
· Museum of Archeology & Anthropology, Cambridge
· Narberth Museum, Wales
· Preston Park Museum, Stockton-on-Tees
· William Morris Gallery, London