1 - INTRODUCTION

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The Museum of Things That Don’t Stand Still with University of Westminster at Tate Exchange, 14–17 May 2019. Photo: Dan Weil

Tate holds the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art. The collection is displayed across four sites: Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, and Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. All of Tate’s activities, including research, support our mission: to promote public understanding and enjoyment of British, modern and contemporary art.

The objective of research at Tate is to maximise the uniqueness of the museum as a research site that is public-facing and practice-led.  Research at Tate aims to be anticipatory and forward-facing. This approach is guided by a belief that museum-based research can make a positive contribution to Tate itself, to the scholarly community and to the public and society more widely. 

Research Partnerships

Tate actively fosters research collaboration and partnership with UK and international higher education institutions and other organisations. Tate has also built research relationships with organisations including the Paul Mellon Centre, independent researchers, artists and museum colleagues in the UK and internationally.

2 - RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

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Lives of Net Art workshop day, part of Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum, Tate Modern, 4 April 2019. Photo: Hydar Dewachi

Research underpins much of what we do at Tate, from staging exhibitions to collecting artworks and finding out how best to care for them and supporting our visitors to engage with and learn about the collection. Rigorous research is undertaken across the institution, by expert staff, independent researchers, and doctoral students, academics, and artists. \

Tate’s Research Department is dedicated to creating a vibrant research culture across the institution that generates high quality research about art and ideas of institutional, national and international significance, shared with a wide and diverse public. Tate is recognised as a centre of excellence in collection care research, curatorial practice, the study of creative learning and museum pedagogy, research publishing and the interrogation of national and global art histories.

Tate’s priority areas for research include: the global and the national; contested museum practices and histories; creative learning and new models of participatory practice; innovations in collection management, conservation and access; and innovations in research publishing. The Research Department is committed to exploring the role of the museum as a research institution, emphasising the importance of practice-based research and reflective practice for museum professionals, and building the intellectual capacity of the museum.

Find out more about current areas of focus for research at Tate:

-          Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational

-          Tate Research Centre: Learning

-          Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum

-          Collection Care Research

-          British Art Network

3 - PhD COLLABORATIONS

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Dr Bronwyn Ormsby (standing second left), Principal Conservation Scientist at Tate, conducting a modern paints surface cleaning workshop for Cleaning Modern Oil Paints (CMOP) partners and colleagues at RCE Amsterdam, April 2017

Tate hosts a growing number of doctoral students engaged in research focused on the collection, audience, and institutional practices. Students work at Tate in a variety of ways, gaining professional experience and contributing their ideas and knowledge to Tate’s programmes and projects.

Tate currently has 35 active PhD students funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) scheme. Partnering with over 20 higher education institutions, the CDP programme fosters diverse research projects spanning the fields of conservation science, collection care, creative learning, museology, and art history.

Learn more about studentships at Tate here.

4 - RESEARCH RESOURCES

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Tate offers a diverse range of resources to researchers, including its collection of works of British and international art, and books, records, and ephemera held in the Tate Library and Archive. Since 2004, Tate has also published Tate Papers, an online peer-reviewed journal.  

  • The collection

Tate’s collection of British and international art is accessible in galleries across the four Tate sites, as well as through the online catalogue.  The Tate website is home to information about artworks, a glossary of art terms, and films on various topics.

  • Tate Papers

Tate Papers is an online, peer-reviewed research journal that publishes scholarly articles on British and modern international art, and on museum practice today. These areas reflect the breadth of Tate’s collection, exhibition programme and activities. Leading specialists from around the world contribute to Tate Papers, as do researchers working at Tate, and the journal aims to showcase a range of disciplinary approaches to the study of art and museums.

  • Library

Tate Library holds a wide selection of books, printed journals and electronic resources about art and artists covering British art since 1500 and international art since 1900. The library also has an extensive collection of artists’ books which date from the 1960s to the present day, and a collection of exhibition catalogues dating from the late 19th century to recent contemporary shows.

  • Archive

Tate Archive contains over a million items related to artists, art world figures and art organisations in Britain, primarily from 1900 to the present day. Serving as the national repository for the history of fine art practice in the UK it includes personal and institutional papers, letters, writings, sketchbooks, audio-visual and born-digital material, photographs and press cuttings. In addition, Tate Archive has an international collection including more than 100,000 documentary photographs of artists, their studios and installation shots, and 3,500 audio-visual accessions.

  • Public records

Tate's Public Records document the full range of Tate’s activities throughout its history, including exhibitions, acquisitions, development and expansion across its current sites. Records include Board of Trustees’ minutes, posters and photographs.

  • Prints and Drawings room

Researchers can access works on paper that are not currently on display in the galleries in the Prints and Drawings Rooms. The Prints and Drawings Room holdings range from nineteenth century sketchbooks and watercolours, to modern and contemporary prints and drawings by leading British and international artists.

5 - WEBSITES AND CONNECTIONS

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A performance of Tony Conrad’s Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain at Tate Liverpool, May 2019
Part of the research project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum. Photo: Mark McNulty