Six museums have been selected as finalists for the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year. This year’s shortlist is: Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, East Sussex; Hayward Gallery, London; The Mary Rose Museum, Portsmouth; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich; Tate Britain, London; and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield.
Established in 2003 and until 2007 known as the Gulbenkian Prize for museums and galleries, the award recognises what the judges believe are the best of the UK’s museums. Last year’s winner was the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London.
The 2014 finalists were chosen by a panel of judges chaired by Art Fund director, Stephen Deuchar. The judges are: Sally Bacon, director of the Clore Duffield Foundation; Michael Craig-Martin RA, artist; Wim Pijbes, director of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and Anna Somers Cocks, chief executive of The Art Newspaper.
Deuchar said: “2013 was a strong year, by any standards, for UK museums and it was no easy task to select a shortlist of six from an extraordinary body of applications. It is almost as if imaginative and innovative curatorship, combined with the highest standards of presentation, is no longer the exception but the rule.
“No wonder that the international reputation of UK museums is riding so high, and we’re delighted that the Museum of the Year will salute this through both the process of the competition and, of course, the £100,000 Prize.”
The 2014 winner will be announced at a ceremony at the National Gallery in London on Wednesday 9 July.
More information about the shortlist can be found at www.artfund.org/prize
