ST IVES.- Tate St Ives announced it will use the £100,000 Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018 prize money to develop a new community strategy with artists at its heart. The funds will support artist-led projects designed for, and in collaboration with, the communities of St Ives, alongside specially-commissioned public artworks in and around the gallery. The programme will deepen the gallery’s longstanding commitment to local audiences, as well as honouring the unique history of St Ives as a place where artists put down roots.

In the coming year, Tate St Ives will embed public art projects, devised for and with the town of St Ives, into the gallery’s future programme. This will build on the success of pilot projects with artists who have enriched existing relationships with the town and engaged new audiences through dialogue and collaboration. Most recently this has included Another Hurling of the Silver Ball, a public art performance in June 2019 developed with the town and jointly choreographed with local community members and residency artist Allard van Hoorn.

A second strand will enable Tate St Ives to work with artists on a series of inspiring public commissions crossing the boundaries between the gallery’s interior and exterior spaces. The first of these new works will be presented in the winter of 2019 as part of the annual St Ives Winter Festival, with more details due to be announced later this year.

The Art Fund Museum of the Year prize was awarded in 2018, in recognition of the four-year building project which transformed Tate St Ives. The launch of its expanded galleries and learning facilities in October 2017 was the culmination of an in-depth consultation process with residents of the St Ives and the larger community of Cornwall. In 2018, Tate St Ives attracted more than 300,000 visitors, a record number since it opened in 1993.

Anne Barlow, Director Tate St Ives said: ‘Winning the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018 award was an incredible honour and recognised the transformative nature of the expansion of Tate St Ives. The deep relationship between art, place and community directly informed that project, and we wanted to embed this in our programme in an active way for the long-term benefit of Cornwall and our local audiences.’