Thursday 12 November: The Box in Plymouth has been shortlisted for Apollo Magazine’s award for Best Museum Opening in 2020!
The winners of the 2020 awards and the Apollo Award for Personality of the Year will be announced during a ceremony on 19 November at 6pm (GMT), which will be available to watch on the Apollo website, and in the December issue of the magazine.
The Box is the UK’s newest major arts and heritage precinct and opened in September earlier this year as part of the Mayflower 400 commemorations. Plymouth’s Museum and Art Gallery, former Central Library and St Luke’s Church buildings have been transformed with a series of large-scale galleries that highlight the city’s fine art, decorative art, natural history, human history, film, photographic and archive collections.
It opened with three major exhibitions Mayflower 400: Legend and Legacy, co-curated with the Wampanoag Native American Advisory Committee; Kehinde Wiley: Ship of Fools including a three-channel film work by the American artist; and Making It, an international contemporary art exhibition featuring newly commissioned works by Antony Gormley, Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes and Brazilian artist Alexandre da Cunha. Nine permanent galleries will also showcase The Box’s incredible collections and will include 14 monumental ships’ figureheads, thousands of natural history specimens, a full-size woolly mammoth replica, paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and ceramics from the city’s art collections, objects, film and photography from its media collections and documents, maps and plans from its archives.
