MUSEUM

east of the tate
the tate's middle east north africa acquisitions committee

Originally set up in 1897 as the national gallery of British art, the Tate Gallery was named after Sir Henry Tate, a millionaire sugar merchant who funded the construction of the original building on the banks of the River Thames and donated his collection of paintings for display within it. In more recent times, 'The Tate' has grown further into a family of four galleries: the original Tate, now known as Tate Britain and housing British art from 1500 to the present; Tate Liverpool, opened in 1988 in a converted warehouse on the refurbished Liverpudlian waterfront; Tate St Ives, specialising in Modern British art in the Cornish town of St Ives since 1993; and Tate Modern, opened in 2000 in the former Bankside Power Station downstream from Tate Britain and the now national museum for international Modern and Contemporary art. In addition, the Tate's online archive is one of the most visited of its type.

The Tate's international dimension has been expanding rapidly on the back of the extraordinary success of Tate Modern during its first decade. Approximately five million visitors throng the galleries and other facilities of this remarkable building each year, and the Tate's presence outside London has helped cement the galleries' wider brand name and their role as a forward-thinking catalyst for art and culture in the broadest sense, both at home in Britain and on the international stage.

That the Tate should now expand its portfolio to include Contemporary art from the Middle East and Arab world comes as no surprise to art aficionados. Indeed, it already holds a number of works from the region, including pieces by Mona Hatoum (Canvas 6.1), Akram Zataari (Canvas 6.1), Hani Rashid, The Atlas Group, Yael Bartana and others. Elsewhere, the Tate has been collecting Contemporary art from Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region for several years now, although it was criticised by some for being late off the mark with Contemporary Asian art...