Tate Publishes Annual Report 2018/19

Tate today published the Annual Report for 2018/19.

This was another successful year, with 8.2 million visitors across our four galleries. We also achieved a combined following of 9.9 million on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and 19 million people visited our website.

The Tate collection was enhanced by 668 works with a collective value of £18.1 million. We added works by women artists from the 17th century to the present, from Mary Beale to Lubaina Himid and Mona Hatoum. We also acquired Yinka Shonibare’s important installation, The British Library. To the international collection we were pleased to add three paintings by the renowned, indigenous Australian artist, Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Tate also announced a new fund to support the staging of live works from our collection.

We have one of the most ambitious lending programmes in the museum and gallery sector. Last year, we lent to 154 venues in the UK and to 153 venues abroad – a total of 1,579 works of art. Works went to a record number of countries, 31 in all, including Brazil, Chile, Estonia, Japan, Mexico, Oman, Poland and Russia. Over 1.2 million people around the world visited touring exhibitions from the collection.

A significant moment in the year came with the appointment of Anna Lowe to Tate’s Board as Tate’s Youth Engagement Trustee. Anna is the youngest serving Trustee at a national museum or gallery in the UK. We also launched Tate Collective for sixteen-to-twenty-five-year olds with an offer of £5 tickets to our temporary exhibitions. To date over 100,000 have joined.

Another highlight of the year was the launch of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. This will significantly impact research activity across our galleries - from exhibitions and displays to caring for and building the collection - and will connect us even more deeply with many institutions and colleagues around the world.

Across the four galleries, we mounted many exceptional exhibitions. Among them we presented the work of Anni Albers, Anna Boghiguian, Pierre Bonnard, Tania Bruguera, Edward Burne-Jones, Don McCullin, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and Francesca Woodman.