Tate Liverpool mobile museum takes masterpieces to communities

Tate Liverpool is going on the road with a special mobile museum to help sharing its passion for art with audiences around the entire city region.

The Royal Albert Dock gallery has teamed up with Art Explora, an international foundation which aims to inspire new encounters between art and audiences, and MuMo to run the initiative – a UK first.

The Art Explora Mobile Museum is on ‘tour’ until April 29, visiting communities across Liverpool, Sefton, Wirral, St Helens, Knowsley and Halton with selected artworks from Tate Liverpool’s 2022 Radical Landscapes exhibition.

On board are paintings, etchings, photographs and more from Tate's collection including those by JMW Turner, John Constable, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, as well as work from 2022 Turner Prize winning artist, Veronica Ryan, and others including Peter Kennard who paid a visit to the mobile museum on its first stop in Sefton and watched as youngsters took part in a workshop, creating their own piece of art to take home.

The project is expected to reach more than 500 schoolchildren in total.

Tate Liverpool director Helen Legg says: “This is a collaboration between Art Explorer, MuMo and Tate to take great art from national museums out into the community. It means we can meet people on their own turf, as it were, and remove traditional barriers to artworks in art museums.

Above: The Mobile Museum with Helen Legg of Tate Liverpool and Art Explora founder Frédéric Jousset (both pictured right). Photo by Peter Byrne. Top: Inside the museum.

“It’s a practical offer to schools and communities to access works but also to work with members of our team and the Art Explorer team in making workshops that can really help young people and communities to engage with some of the techniques they will see in the work on show.

“It will help them express themselves and build new skills and develop their confidence.”

And Frédéric Jousset, founder of Art Explora, adds: “Art Explora was founded with the mission to make art accessible to all. Despite the best efforts of museums everywhere, there remains a social divide between those who go to museums and those that don’t.

“Art Explora is trying to bridge this divide by taking arts out to new communities and by creating encounters with art in unexpected places.

“The Mobile Museum is a wonderful way to present our national collections to new audiences, to show that art can be discovered on your own doorstep, and to offer everybody a chance to take part in our collective creative adventure.”