Yale Center for British Art reopens ‘in a new light’

The renowned English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner is celebrated as “the painter of light” for the masterly ways he depicted sunlight in his landscapes and seascapes. 

Similarly, in the 1970s Louis Kahn expertly deployed daylight into his design for the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), the distinguished architect’s last building project. When the YCBA reopens on March 29 after a two-year closure for building conservation, sunshine will once again brighten its Entrance Court, second-floor Library Court, and fourth-floor galleries.

“The play of light is integral to the aesthetic experience of the building, and this is what makes it such a special place for seeing art,” said Martina Droth, the Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art. 

As part of the conservation project, all of the museum’s original 224 skylights were replaced, and a new roof was installed. The museum’s halogen lighting system was swapped out for more efficient LED lighting. As a result, the museum’s lighting system is nearly 60% more energy efficient than it was prior to the conservation work. More than 6,500 linear feet of track lighting was installed in the galleries. 

“We are thrilled to welcome visitors back to the museum to reconnect with our extraordinary collections,” Droth said. 

On Thursday, March 27, from noon to 6 p.m., the museum will host an open house and reception for Yale faculty, staff, and students. The museum will reopen to the public with a weekend-long celebration on March 29 and 30. Droth will be joined by Yale President Maurie McInnis and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker for remarks and a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 12 p.m. on March 29. 

For YCBA leaders, the two-year closure provided an opportunity to rethink how the museum displays its permanent collection — the largest and most comprehensive assemblage of British art outside the United Kingdom — in its fourth-floor galleries. 

“Our goal is not to present a finished narrative, but to present a vibrant and constantly evolving conversation that connects the history of British art from the past to the present,” Droth said. 

The new fourth-floor installation, titled “In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art,” takes visitors on a journey spanning the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the present. The display opens with 16th-century portraits of nobles and other symbols of empire before transitioning to other subjects, including contemporary critiques of Britain’s imperial past.

For the reopening, the YCBA is presenting two major exhibitions that together demonstrate the richness and breadth of the artwork visitors will discover at the museum. “J.M.W. Turner: Romance and Reality,” on view on the museum’s third floor, marks the great painter’s 250th birthday and draws on the museum’s rich holdings of the artist’s work. The collection encompasses all phases of Turner’s 60-year career, in which he both emulated past luminaries of the European landscape tradition and attempted to surpass them. 

On the second floor, “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning,” is the first presentation of the influential contemporary artist’s work in a North American museum and the first ever solo museum exhibition to focus on her work as a painter. Emin, whose sculptural installations during the 1990s made her an icon of the era, created a neon installation for the show that welcomes visitors in the museum’s Entrance Court. In the piece, a display of the exhibition title is scrawled in yellow neon light against a mirrored background. 

“Something we can uniquely do here at the YCBA is to initiate a dialogue between these two artists across time,” said Droth, who curated the Emin exhibition in close consultation with the artist and her creative director, Harry Weller. 

That conversation between the past and present permeates “In a New Light,” on the museum’s fourth floor. At the beginning of the display, visitors can glance to the left and see contemporary pieces on display or look to the right and find portraits of 16th-century aristocrats. If they decide to walk to the right, they will soon encounter a recent acquisition: a circa 1675 portrait, of an unknown woman, by the painter Mary Beale, a hugely successful artist in her time.

“We all know that there were so few women artists through history,” said Lucinda Lax, curator of paintings and sculpture at the YCBA. “[Beale] was one of those who was able to command the attention of her contemporaries. She made a huge success story of her practice. This kind of work — a glamorous three-quarter-length portrait — sums up the public side of her portrait practice.”

A few steps from Beale’s portrait, visitors will encounter the earliest known painting of Barbados, the Caribbean island where the British built thriving sugarcane plantations on the backs of an enslaved workforce beginning in the 17th century. 

The painting, dated circa 1694, underwent a transformative restoration during the museum renovation that revealed details that had been obscured by discolored varnish and gratuitous retouching. 

“This is a painting that we are now looking at literally in a new light,” said Edward Town, assistant curator for painting and sculpture, adding that the restoration uncovered details that illuminate the island’s history. 

For example, the painting depicts an Indigenous figure whom the British would have transported to the island from North America to help cultivate the island.

As visitors continue through the gallery, it opens up to reveal some of the YCBA’s major landscape paintings, including “Stratford Mill” and “Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames—Morning after a Stormy Night,” by 19th-century artist John Constable. 

Those paintings, Lax said, have been interwoven into a narrative contemplating the environment and changing landscape as Britain entered the Industrial Revolution during the 19th century.

For example, “A View of Murton Colliery near Seaham, County Durham,” by John Wilson Carmichael, depicts a coal mine in the North of England.

As visitors reach the contemporary works on view, they cannot miss “Mrs. Pickney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina,” a 2017 sculpture by artist Yinka Shonibare CBE, commissioned by the YCBA, that addresses the triangular trade between West Africa, North America, and Europe of enslaved people and goods. In the sculpture, a female figure personifying the British Empire stands atop a globe of the world as the colonizers perceived it.

The Turner show provides an overview of the artist’s transformative practice, beginning with early, meticulously rendered landscapes and ending with the evocative impressions of the natural world from his later years, said Lax, who curated the exhibition. 

It features a few of Turner’s most iconic oil paintings, such as “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave” (exhibited 1832), and “Dort, or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed” (1818).

At the show’s end, visitors are invited to ponder Turner’s impressionistic “Inverary Pier: Loch Fyne: Morning,” which he created around 1845 and which was one of the last pieces found in his studio after he died in 1851.

“It’s just so stunning,” Lax said of the painting. “It epitomizes late Turner… It’s beautiful, abstract, but also representational. If you look closely, you will see the forms of the pier and the forest behind it. It just holds your attention.” 

The Emin exhibition features 19 large-scale paintings along with a selection of drawings and sculptures. One of the paintings, “I Followed you to the end” (2024), was gifted to the YCBA through the generosity of the George Economou collection. In the piece, a female figure stands against a background of red that drips down her torso and over the text of a raw poem about love, pain, and regret. 

Like much of Emin’s work, it is autobiographical and confessional; the text a reflection of her feelings in the moment she put the brush to canvas. 

“The writing is automatic,” Weller said. “It is immediate. It is just a response to her mood of the day.”

Additional information on the YCBA’s reopening celebration is available on the museum’s website. The YCBA, located at 1080 Chapel St. in New Haven, offers free admission and is open to the public.