Government Art Collection adds Yorkshire and East artists

On paper, this looks like a small arts announcement. According to a Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport release, the Government Art Collection has bought ten new works linked to Yorkshire and the Humber and the East of England, and those works are due to appear in British embassies and government buildings from Washington DC to Abu Dhabi. For us, the interesting bit is not only that artists are being celebrated. It is that public institutions are deciding which stories, regions and communities get placed in official rooms where Britain presents itself to the world.

That matters because the Government Art Collection is not a private gallery. It is a public collection used in ministers’ offices, state buildings and diplomatic spaces. The department says works from the collection are shown in more than 125 countries, so a painting or sculpture can end up doing quiet political work long after it leaves the studio. **What this means:** when an embassy hangs a work on its wall, it is not just decorating a room. It is offering visitors an idea of Britain, and that makes questions of class, race, disability, migration and region part of the picture.

This year’s acquisitions form the fourth chapter of Art X-UK, a five-year buying programme launched by the Government Art Collection in 2022 after a pilot in 2020 and 2021. The aim, according to the Government Art Collection, is to make sure the national collection reflects creative work from across the whole UK rather than circling around the same familiar centres. So far, the project has brought in more than 170 works by 80 contemporary visual artists. It began with Wales and the Midlands, moved on to Scotland and the North East, then Northern Ireland and the North West, and is now focusing on Yorkshire and the Humber alongside the East of England before turning to the South East and South West in 2026 and 2027.

There are ten new works in this year’s intake, made by eight artists. From Yorkshire and the Humber, the artists named are Kedisha Coakley, Karanjit Panesar, Grace Clifford and Sam Metz. From the East of England, they are Issam Kourbaj, Sikelela Owen, Amartey Golding and Claire Cansick. **How the scheme works:** the pieces will be displayed in buildings across the UK and in ten British embassies and ambassadors’ residences overseas, including Washington DC, Ankara, Abu Dhabi and Paris. The selection did not happen in isolation: regional bodies YVAN and CVAN East helped bring together artists and curators to suggest names for the collection to research.

Some of the chosen work makes the reason for that regional approach easy to see. Grace Clifford, who works in Sheffield, uses everyday objects and industrial materials to question easy stereotypes about working-class communities. Her bronze pub stool is exactly the sort of object that can change a room’s mood: ordinary at first glance, but loaded with memory, labour and local meaning. Kedisha Coakley’s sculptures focus on histories that are often pushed to the edges of public collections, especially Black British experience and the links between colonialism, botany and extraction. Sam Metz has spoken about stimming as creative practice and about the role Yorkshire arts organisations have played in backing disabled artists. Put together, these choices show that regional art is not one style; it is many different accounts of how people live now.

The East of England selections widen that conversation again. Issam Kourbaj, born in Syria and based in Cambridge since 1990, makes work about migration, memory and displacement, often using fragile materials and found objects to speak about journeys and what people carry from home. Claire Cansick describes Norfolk as both beloved and, at times, overlooked, and her work tries to draw a line between a coastal community and the wider world. Amartey Golding frames his inclusion as meaningful in a difficult political moment, pointing to the East of England’s long histories of resistance and social reform. Even without seeing every piece in person, you can read a common thread here: place matters, but place is never simple. It is shaped by movement, exclusion, belonging and repair.

The official language around the project is upbeat. Arts Minister Ruth Mackenzie says Art X-UK is about championing artists from every part of the country and helping them flourish internationally. Paula Orrell of CVAN England makes a related point: when power and funding are discussed region by region, local knowledge matters if national collections are going to represent more than the loudest cities. **What to notice:** words such as representation and recognition can sound vague until you place them in a real setting. Here they mean that a bronze stool from Sheffield, or a work shaped by Syrian exile and Cambridge bookbinding, may sit in rooms where diplomats host guests and where the state chooses how to be seen.

This is why the story is bigger than an acquisitions note. Public collections do not merely store objects; they help decide what counts as part of the country’s shared memory. When the Government Art Collection buys work from artists who speak about working-class life, Black British histories, disability, migration or coastal place, it slightly shifts that memory in public view. For readers, there is a useful lesson here. Culture policy can sound distant until you follow where the art goes, who chooses it and who gets left out. In this case, the Government Art Collection is saying that Britain should look more like Yorkshire, Hull, Sheffield, Cambridge and Norfolk when it speaks to the world. That is worth paying attention to.