Art Fund International is a £5 million funding initiative launched by the Art Fund in 2007 in order to encourage UK museums and galleries to build outstanding collections of international contemporary art.

 

One of the most important and ambitious schemes ever launched by the Art Fund, the initiative allocated £1 million each to five successful partnerships between UK museums and contemporary art organisations, to fund the creation of collections of international contemporary art over a period of five years, thus encouraging a radical change in the scale and ambition of contemporary art collecting in the UK.

The successful partnerships are:
º Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives in partnership with Arnolfini with a collection theme of ‘Glass Walls: Reflections and Interactions’. The City Museum and Art Gallery’s existing works are a starting point, along with the strong connections the city’s communities have with other parts of the world. It will be a collection of work by artists who are responding to the contemporary forces of urbanisation, tradition and identity, globalisation and migration.
º Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow in partnership with The Common Guild whose collection will aim to establish an international context for the Gallery’s recent acquisitions of Scottish art. Over the next five years it will initially focus on building a collection of high quality international photography, film, video, audio and text-based work with a preference for acquisitions that reflect socially engaged practice.
º Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) in partnership with The Drawing Centre, New York  and others will build an important collection of drawings made by artists living and working in North and South America from different generations and with varying degrees of renown. The ultimate goal being to secure outstanding works by those artists who are, and who will become, internationally significant.
º Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne in partnership with Photoworks, Brighton Photo Biennial and Artsway. Taking Eastbourne’s position on the south coast beside Beachy Head as a starting point, the Eastbourne partnership will collect art that reflects upon images of Edges. These could be real physical boundaries such as the beach, cliffs, the horizon and the edge of urban development, or social frontiers such as national boundaries, conflict zones like the Balkans and Israel and Palestine, or of social migration such as across Europe or between the United States of America and Mexico.
º The West Midlands Partnership: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and New Art Gallery Walsall in partnership with Ikon whose collection theme is ‘The Metropolis – reflections of modern urban life’. It will explore the diversity, dynamism and growth of the contemporary metropolis through an international collection with a central theme of city life representing a powerful shifting strand of contemporary culture.

The museums and galleries involved are acquiring works through Art Fund international until 2012 – keep an eye on our news pages for latest acquisition announcements.

Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives

Making links with the museum's historical collections, the new collection acquired through Art Fund international will connect with the museum's historical international collections - from Egypt, North and West Africa and China. Bristol's first acquisitions under Art Fund international reflect this focus, with the acquisition of Peripheral, a video installation by Hala Elkoussy and three photographs from the series Sleepers by Yto Barrada.

mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
	mima acquires works by legendary American artist Ellsworth Kelly The works, Untitled, 1957 and Untitled, 1959, have come directly from Ellsworth Kelly’s studio and were selected after extensive conversations between mima and the artist himself. See our news pages for more details about these works

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
	GoMA have acquired Lothar Baumgarten’s installation Unsettled Objects (1968–69) Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and Emily Jacir’s From Texas With Love, new acquisitions through Art Fund International that reflect and provide context for their existing contemporary art collection. See our news pages for more details about these works