Whitechapel Gallery

The Whitechapel Art Gallery was founded in 1901 to bring great art to the people of east London. Internationally acclaimed for its exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and its pioneering education and public events programmes, the Gallery has premiered international artists such as Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Nan Goldin, and provided a showcase for Britain’s most significant artists from Gilbert & George to  Lucian Freud, Peter Doig to Mark Wallinger.     

The Gallery plays a unique role in the capital’s cultural landscape and is pivotal to the continued growth of east London as the world’s most vibrant contemporary art quarter.

The Whitechapel Gallery expanded into the former Passmore Edwards library, reopening in April 2009. The Gallery and former Library are two of the many public and cultural buildings which were founded throughout east London by nineteenth century philanthropists. Their adjacency underlined their significance as two facets of the wide-ranging programme for social reform initiated by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett. The breadth of the Barnetts’ social vision was strongly informed by the Settlement movement which embraced housing reform, social dialogue, learning and culture.

Through uniting the Gallery and former Library it acknowledged the two buildings as part of an enterprise of unusual ambition and idealism even in the spectrum of Victorian philanthropy. It is an opportunity to fulfil and update the founders’ ambitions to create a dialogue between the area’s many constituencies, and provide access for all to culture and learning.

For more information on events at The Whitechapel Gallery, please visit their website.