Tate St Ives
Tate St Ives is a gallery of modern and contemporary art in Cornwall, opened in 1993 in a building on the Porthmeor beachfront presenting changing exhibitions of work by artists connected with the St Ives tradition and the wider development of modern British art. The gallery's location above one of Cornwall's finest surfing beaches, with Atlantic light flooding through north-facing windows, creates an exceptional relationship between the art and its coastal setting. The St Ives art colony, developing from the 1880s onward, produced some of the most significant British art of the twentieth century. Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo, Patrick Heron and Terry Frost worked here, and the colony's engagement with international modernist movements placed this small Cornish town at the centre of British art history. The Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Garden in the artist's former studio, managed by the Tate, provides the most direct engagement with the most important artist of the St Ives school. The gallery's extension, added in 2017 to provide additional space with direct views of Porthmeor beach, demonstrates continued investment in this exceptional cultural facility. The combination of the gallery, the sculpture garden and the extraordinary St Ives townscape makes this one of the most rewarding cultural destinations in the southwest of England.