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The Restoration

British art is back at Yale—with a wider lens.

By Robin Cembalest ’82 | May/Jun 2025

Robin Cembalest '82, the former editor of Artnews, teaches at the School of Visual Arts.

“I loved you until the morning.”

The large neon display in the entrance court of the Yale Center for British Art, sharing an intimate, unnerving confession, is the work of Tracey Emin, the well-known British artist whose solo show of the same title is on view upstairs. With her candy-colored cursive script and selfie-inviting mirrored backdrop, Emin deftly channels light, a signature tactic of the building’s architect, Louis I. Kahn, to announce her exhibition in a landmark space where banners and posters are not allowed.

Reflecting Kahn’s subdued interior, with its gridded interplay of white oak, concrete, and Belgian linen, the display is visible from the street, announcing that something new is happening behind the matte steel exterior at the corner of Chapel and High.
Designed by Kahn to house the gift of Paul Mellon ’29, the structure does not shout “museum.” In contrast to the nearly windowless brick façade of the Yale University Art Gallery across the street (Kahn’s first major building), the architect designed his final major commission in the United States to be “an urban building that reinforces the commerical and civic life of Chapel Street,” notes George Knight ’95MArch, a New Haven architect whose firm led the building’s recent, massive conservation project.

Opening in 1977, three years after the architect’s death, the center instantly became an architectural icon, as renowned for Kahn’s humanistic geometry as for its holdings, considered the best collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. But it has been out of view for four of the last five years. Like all museums, it shut down during the pandemic, reopening in 2022. Then in February 2023, it closed again for the long-planned conservation.

During a festive reopening in March, the center revealed what had been going on in the meantime. The rebooted YCBA reflects decades of work to honor the legacy and vision of the towering figures who created it while continuing its full identity as a university art museum, teaching and research center, and cultural resource in New Haven. “No museum wants to be closed,” says director Martina Droth. “But the reopening is such an opportunity to reconnect and to restate who we are. This museum is so special. The collections are so amazing. And not enough people know that.”

With solo shows by Emin and an earlier British art star, J. M. W. Turner, a full-floor installation chronicling 500 years of British art, and a host of new programs, alliances, and collaborations, today’s YCBA leans into Mellon’s gift while embracing contemporary art and global perspectives.

Working with professors, advisors, students, and experts from Yale and beyond, museum staff researched previously unidentified figures, including servants and enslaved people. Conservators cleaned pictures that had never been shown. Curators made major acquisitions. Educators and art historians teamed up for outreach programs that bring the center and its offerings to new audiences inside the university, and beyond.

Positioning the center as a hub for multidisciplinary conversations across departments is a key role of Christina Ferando ’97, who joined last summer as inaugural head of academic affairs. Though her purview is scholarly, she says, her experience in her prior position as dean of Jonathan Edwards College informs her approach. “I think, What would the 18-year-old first-year coming from a rural community that maybe has never been into a museum, what are they going to experience here?” she says. “Whether they’re in environmental studies, whether they’re in anthropology. I don’t ever want a faculty member or student to think, Well, it’s a museum about British art—I don’t think they’re going to have anything for me, right?”

During the years the museum was closed, there were changes in leadership as well. Courtney Martin ’09PhD, director since 2019, left for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation last year, with former Yale College dean Richard Brodhead ’68, ’72PhD, stepping in as interim director. Droth, a 16-year veteran of the museum who was previously deputy director and chief curator, was named the new director in January, in time to preside over the grand reopening in March.

The events drew droves of students who had never been able to enter, and longtime fans delighted to be back. One of them was Yale president Maurie
McInnis ’96PhD. “I curated my first exhibition at the YCBA when I was a graduate student, and I have spent countless hours with its extraordinary collections,” she wrote in an email. “So, walking into the YCBA was both like visiting with old friends and like visiting somewhere entirely new.”

While the museum staff was pushing toward greater visibility, the conservation team was striving to make as little visual impact as possible, treating the museum as an art object while also adapting it to contemporary needs. Whether replacing original materials or adapting the structure for new technology, Knight and his many collaborators were guided by more than a decade of research into Kahn’s methods, materials, and mission—and specifically by a 2011 conservation plan that established a set of policies governing renovations and changes to the building.

The most complex job was preserving that ephemeral natural light, filtered by an elaborate system of 224 skylights that Kahn conceived in collaboration with lighting designer Richard Kelly ’44BArch. The acrylic materials shaping the domes had deteriorated. Meanwhile, techniques for shielding art from harmful rays had improved. “There was an incredible amount of care, color rendition, color temperature—all the different aspects of lighting design were challenged and tested,” Knight says. In the end, the team replaced the acrylic skylights with polycarbonate domes, installing new laylight cassettes lined with a removable light-reducing film. They also installed a more energy-efficient lighting system. “It’s indistinguishable from the original lighting scheme, though fabulously better environmentally,” Knight says.

The closure also brought time to showcase the collections as never before. The fourth-floor installation, In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art, marks the first time the center is presenting British art spanning the range of its collection in a chronological sequence on the same floor, with 374 works from the early sixteenth century to the present (including 20 pieces in the Library Court).

The first work visitors encounter is a towering, fantastical female figure balancing precariously on a globe. Created in 2017 by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, she wears a blue-patterned gown in the artist’s signature material, the Dutch wax-printed cotton associated with West Africa. The door on her bird-cage head swings open, the escaped creatures perching on their former captor. Titled Mrs Pinckney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina, the sculpture was inspired by a true event: the 1753 meeting of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, owner of a South Carolina slave plantation, and Augusta, Princess of Wales.  

To accompany Shonibare’s piece in this opening gallery, curators chose works from across time and genres: a painting by the Hungarian-born artist Jakob Bogdány showing imported birds in a parkland setting from Mellon’s collection, and two recent acquisitions: a portrait of Lady Mary Boyle breastfeeding her son by Godfrey Kneller, and an abstraction by Cecily Brown. The grouping suggests key themes that are explored in the different sections to come—including gender, representation, class hierarchies, and Britain’s maritime empire and overseas possessions. While multiple staff members collaborated on the labels and wall texts to draw out those themes, says Lucinda Lax, curator of paintings and sculpture, they have also been conscious to make their points visually, creating groupings of works that “even if people are not completely familiar with some of these histories, that actually by looking at the walls, they will be intrigued. Hopefully they’ll want to know more.”

Lax also curated the Turner show, featuring 77 works from the museum’s vast collection. She conceived the title, Romance and Reality, to convey the contradictory aspects of the artist’s practice. Traversing Turner’s career, the show addresses his persona as a shrewd businessman who shaped his public image, and the forces that shaped him. And it chronicles the way he developed his signature style, what Lax calls “atmospheric topography,” as he invested his work with greater mood, emotion, and atmosphere.

Then there is the Tracey Emin show. Curated by Droth, the exhibition features a selection of the artist’s raw, gestural, and often autobiographical paintings, depicting themes of illness, sexuality, intimacy.

Knowing that Emin’s content can be triggering, the education department worked closely with Droth to frame the show. “We were really mindful of situating the exhibition within the conversations that were already going on on campus,” says Hannah Wirta Kinney, head of education. Her team reached out to faculty and administrators across the university, from communication and consent educators to the gender studies department. The meetings helped them  develop the content warning and programming around the show.

Another major exhibition, opening in october, is the first US survey of the work of Hew Locke, the Guyanese-British artist, featuring the elaborate installations that the museum describes as “postcolonial baroque.” Many of his pieces are based on or inspired by the types of works on view upstairs. In one series, Locke mimics what he calls “swagger portraits” of aristocrats by British artists like Reynolds and Gainsborough, appearing in his own version clad in a carnival costume.

Staging a show devoted to an artist with British-Caribbean identity in a museum in the US devoted to British art carries a wider message, Locke says. “I’d like people to come away thinking, ‘Right, the Caribbean is more complicated than I thought.’ . . . British art is not just one thing. British art is many things.”  

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