In this uncertain new era of social distancing and self-isolation, collections, museums and galleries all across the UK have made the responsible decision to close their doors to the public. For most of these institutions, many months and years of hard work and preparation have gone into developing an exhibition program, exhibition or display, meaning that this temporary cancellation of culture weighs heavily on those working diligently in the museum sector.
Here's a breakdown of public collection and museum closure notifications, as well as the postponed exhibitions you can still read about online, plus more detail about how you can support collections. We will continue to update this page at the request of collections. It is always worth following the links below for up-to-date information.
In the meantime, find out more about how Art UK proposes to help museums and collections.
Featured regions:
England: London
Foundling Museum
The Foundling Museum will remain closed to the public until 1st May.
Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media
Garden Museum
The Garden Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.
Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939. This exhibition is postponed until 3rd November 2020.
The golden age of garden painting will be celebrated in this new selling exhibition presented in partnership with Liss Llewellyn. 'Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939' will show over 20 artists including Charles Mahoney, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Evelyn Dunbar, John Nash, Nancy Nicholson, Kenneth Rowntree and Winifred Knights.
National Portrait Gallery
The National Portrait Gallery is closed until further notice.
Cecil Beaton, Bright Young Things
David Hockney: Drawing from Life
Read Art UK's stories on David Hockney, 'David Hockney: swimming pools and suburbia' and 'Farah Nayeri on David Hockney's 'Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy'.'
National Gallery
The National Gallery is closed until 4th May.
In this first major exhibition of Artemisia Gentileschi's work in the UK, her best-known paintings including her celebrated self-portraits and Judith beheading Holofernes will be on display. Read Art UK's story, 'Artemisia Gentileschi: brilliant Baroque icon'.
Stay tuned for Art UK's upcoming interview with the show's curator, Letizia Treves.
Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria
c.1615–1617
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654 or after) 
Royal Academy of Arts
The Royal Academy is temporarily closed until further notice.
This exhibition features Pablo Picasso's creative process first-hand in remarkable documentary footage of the artist at work, studies for Guernica, and sketchbooks where the seeds of revolutionary masterpieces first took shape, including Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Gauguin and the Impressionists: Masterpiece from the Ordrupgaard Collection
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.
Cars: Accelerating the Modern World
Read Art UK's story, 'From Kyoto to London: keeping up with the kimono'.
Renaissance Watercolours: from Dürer to Van Dyck. This exhibition is cancelled.
William Morris Gallery
The William Morris Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper
Known for his heroic images of black subjects, American artist Kehinde Wiley mixes photorealistic portraiture with highly patterned backdrops, referencing the floral motifs of William Morris.
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is temporarily closed until further notice.
British Baroque: Power and Illusion
Sir John Soane Museum
Sir John Soane Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.
Langlands & Bell: Degrees of Truth
Stanley Spencer Gallery, Berkshire
The Stanley Spencer Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
Love, Art, Loss: The Wives of Stanley Spencer
This exhibition explores how Spencer's paintings convey the joys, sorrows and complexities of his relationships with his two wives, Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece. Read Art UK's story, 'Patricia Preece and Dorothy Hepworth: love, art and deception'.
England: Midlands and East
Cambridge
Fitzwilliam Museum
The Fitzwilliam Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.
Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800
A multi-sensory exhibition serving up hidden and newly conserved treasures, plus historical reconstructions of a Jacobean sugar banquet and a Georgian confectioner's workshop. Read Art UK's story 'Food and Feasting in European art history'.
Virtue, Vice & the Senses: Prints 1540–1660
Fans Unfolded: Conserving the Lennox-Boyd Collection
Sharpening Perceptions: How to Copy a Masterpiece
Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge
Kettle's Yard is temporarily closed until further notice.
In the museum's announcement, they have asked for support via the shop or donations.
Birmingham
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is temporarily closed until further notice.
Cézanne and the Modern French Print
Maternal Bonds: Images of Motherhood
The New Art Gallery Walsall, Birmingham
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery are temporarily closed until further notice.
Webster and Horsfall: 300 Years of Innovation
Leicester
New Walk Museum & Art Gallery
The New Walk Museum and Art Gallery are temporarily closed until further notice.
Dissent & Displacement: A Modern Story
Drawing inspiration from the museum's German Expressionist collections and the artist's refugee heritage, printmaker Monica Petzal tackles themes of opposition, persecution and persistence.
A split-site exhibition at New Walk Museum & Art Gallery and Soft Touch Arts that looks at prison life, created by men serving sentences at HMP Leicester and HMP Stocken.
England: North
Manchester
Manchester Art Gallery
The Manchester Art Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
A major retrospective of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century British culture, this exhibition focuses on Derek Jarman's practice as a painter, filmmaker, writer, set-designer, and political activist. Read 'The Last of England: saving Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage.'
The Whitworth, University of Manchester
The Whitworth is temporarily closed until further notice.
Influenced by Thomas More's Utopia, this exhibition crosses genres, media and timeframes to provide a playful and provocative framework for probing how Britain's literary and visual culture has perpetuated an idea of a utopian society that fosters nostalgic yearnings for a seemingly lost past.
Preston
The Harris Museum and Art Gallery
The Harris Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.
The Artful Line: Drawings from the Harris Collection and The Courtauld Gallery
Sheffield
Weston Park Museum, Museums Sheffield
Weston Park Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.
Created by photographer Simon Bray after the death of his father, this project invites people to find a family photograph, then return to the location to re-create it and record a conservation about the experience.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is temporarily closed until further notice.
Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945
The first extensive study of post-war British sculpture by women in the UK. Spanning more than seventy years and exploring the work of fifty sculptors, this exhibition provides a radical recalibration, addressing the many accounts of British sculpture that have marginalised women or airbrushed their work out of the art historical canon altogether. It features sculptors such as Phyllida Barlow, Kim Lim, Rana Begum, Cornelia Parker, Sarah Lucas and Barbara Hepworth.
See collages and constructions in steel, card and wire that reveal an artist who thinks by making, and is inspired by engineering, architecture, nature and music.
The Hepworth Wakefield
The Hepworth Wakefield Garden has remained open. Read their public statement about closure.
This pairing of the famed photographer alongside the great sculptor looks at their shared interests in the themes of labour, society, industry, landscape and the human body.
York
York Art Gallery
York Art Gallery and Garden temporarily closed until further notice.
Harland Miller: York, So Good They Named It Once
New and existing works represent the artist's relationship to York, the city in which he grew up, as well as making wider references to the culture and geography of Yorkshire.
Newcastle
Laing Art Gallery
The Laing Art Gallery is temporarily closed until 1st May (to be confirmed).
This exhibition critically examines why artists have chosen to use watercolour. During the First and Second World Wars, war artists used watercolour out of necessity. The medium is portable, adaptable and quicker-drying than oil paint meaning that they could work at speed to capture what was happening around them. The series is inspired by the Laing's recent acquisition of Edward Burra's Landscape with Red Wheels.
England: South and West
Brighton
Brighton Museum
All Brighton Museum venues are temporarily closed until further notice.
Anita Corbin: 100 First Women Portraits
Anita Corbin has photographed 100 pioneering women of the twenty-first century, spanning an impressive record of achievement, from beatboxing to bomb detection.
Eastbourne
Towner Eastbourne
Towner Eastbourne is temporarily closed until further notice.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan: This whole time there were no landmines
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a Turner Prize-winning artist based in Beirut whose work looks into the political effects of listening, using various kinds of audio to explore its effects on human rights and law.
Alan Davie and David Hockney: Early Works
Organised by the Hepworth Wakefield, this show traces the parallel paths of two key post-war painters, and their shared preoccupations with passion, love, sex and poetry.
Hampshire
Chawton House
Chawton House is closed but the gardens remain open to visitors.
Man Up: Women who Stepped into a Man's World
Chawton House's 2020 exhibition highlights stories of women who stepped into male roles. By picking up a pen, pistol or sword, they broke with convention to survive and thrive.
Chichester
Pallant House Gallery
Pallant House Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
A Life in Art: The Muriel Wilson Bequest
Discover prized works from the curator and collector Muriel Wilson, an early supporter of artists including Peter Blake, Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson.
Barnett Freedman: Designs for Modern Britain
Swindon
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery
Pop and Prosperity: 1960s British Art from the Swindon Collection
This exhibition explores the impact of popular culture and society on British art in the 1960s, and features work by Howard Hodgkin, Michael Craig-Martin and Mary Fedden.
Art on Tour: Highlights from the Swindon Collection of Modern British Art
The exhibition is part of Art on Tour 2020, a project which aims to take more of Swindon's art collection out of storage, and share it with more people in more places throughout the year.
Oxford
Ashmolean Museum
The Ashmolean is temporarily closed until further notice.
Beginning with his earliest known paintings, prints and drawings made in the mid-1620s, and ending at the moment he rockets to stardom in Amsterdam in the mid-1630s, this exhibition charts Rembrandt van Rijn's astonishing transformation.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) (style of) 
Incredible imagination and technical prowess can be found in these highlights from the collection's eighteenth and nineteenth-century Greek embroideries.
Southhampton
Southampton City Art Gallery
Southampton City Art Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
John Hitchens: Aspects of Landscape
Created over a period of more than five decades, this exhibition follows the artist's journey from early descriptive paintings to increasingly abstract ways of interpreting landscape.
Bournemouth
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum is temporarily closed until 31st May.
An exhibition highlighting the importance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its influence on artistic developments including Realism, Aestheticism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau.
Bristol
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery is temporarily closed but will reopen on 1st May.
Hinamatsuri: Japanese Dolls Festival
Tate St Ives
Tate St Ives is temporarily closed until further notice.
A major display of existing and new work by the South Korean artist renowned for using industrial and everyday materials and craft-based procedures to create creature-like sculptures.
Northern Ireland
Belfast
Ulster Museum
Ulster Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.
Working in porcelain sculpture, embroidery and drawing, much of Ursula Burke's art practice deals with issues of representation and identity, in both social and political spheres.
Naughton Gallery at Queen's University Belfast
Naughton Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
Fire in the Middle: Miguel Martin
Scotland
Aberdeen
Aberdeen City Council
Exhibitions at Aberdeen City Council are closed until further notice.
The first major solo show of Haroon Mirza's work in Scotland highlights the artist's ongoing exploration of waveforms and interest in disciplines including physics, shamanism and artificial intelligence.
Edinburgh
National Museum of Scotland
The National Museum of Scotland is temporarily closed until further notice.
To mark the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath the famous document goes on public display for the first time in 15 years.
An exhibition telling the stories behind objects derived from British military campaigns in Africa and India which are held by national and military museums in the UK.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
All of the Scottish National Galleries are temporarily closed until further notice.
Beyond Realism: Dada and Surrealism
Featuring works by artists such as Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.
Glasgow
Gallery of Modern Art
The Gallery of Modern Art is temporarily closed until further notice.
Hal Fischer: Gay Semiotics and Other Works
A display of photographic works by the American artist, who documented the gay male culture of San Francisco in the late 1970s.
Hunterian Art Gallery
The Hunterian Art Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
Recently retired Hunterian curator Dr Peter Black picks out works by major artists, past and present, including Peter Paul Rubens, Lucian Freud, and William Gear.
Wales
Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth University School of Art Gallery
Aberystwyth Gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
This exhibition celebrates the ongoing friendship and collaboration between artists with a shared interested in abstraction and who are connected to Aberystwyth University, having met while teaching or studying.
Cardiff
National Museum Cardiff
The National Museum Cardiff is temporarily closed until further notice.
This show features Burton's diaries, papers and personal objects, follow the remarkable story of how a boy from Pontrhydyfen and Taibach, Port Talbot, became the international star of stage and screen.
Lydia Figes, Content Editor at Art UK
