The UK’s first permanent mobile museum will tour the country next year, bringing major works from the Government Art Collection (GAC) to new audiences.
The ambitious new scheme is backed by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the French arts charity Art Explora which have both donated £800,000 each towards the initiative. The new mobile museum, currently being built in Telford, will be designed by the London-based company Ab Rogers.
From 2027, Art Explora will tour the new mobile museum showing three 12-week exhibitions each year. “GAC works will feature in one exhibition annually, with national and regional partners including the National Portrait Gallery, Leeds Art Gallery, Birmingham Museums Trust and National Museums Liverpool among other national museums delivering the remaining programme to ensure the widest possible reach across the UK,” says a project statement.
Works from the Government Art Collection are currently on show in the Art Explora Mobile Museum in Plymouth in the exhibition Shaped by the Sea (until 13 September); artists featured include Zineb Sedira, Lubaina Himid and JMW Turner. An existing Art Explora Mobile Museum is due to travel this summer to the southwest and northwest of England. Previously, the Mobile Museum toured works from the Tate collection to boroughs in the Liverpool City Region in 2023, and to the Midlands and North of England in 2024.
Art Explora, described as an “international foundation” online, was founded by Frédéric Jousset in 2019. The son of the former Centre Pompidou curator Marie-Laure Jousset, Jousset is the founder of WebHelp—a tech support and outsourcing company that was valued at €2.4bn in 2019 according to Business Review magazine. He is among the funders of the V&A East Storehouse which opened in Stratford, east London, last year.
Jousset says in a statement: “Art Explora was founded on the belief that art should be accessible to everyone. We now have a growing Mobile Museum fleet in France, which, over 15 years, has proven the value of bringing art from our national collections directly to communities. UK government support for a dedicated UK truck is an important milestone, as we extend access to great art collections further across Europe.”
