The weekly feature rounds up the latest updates in museum appointments, openings, funding and new exhibitions from across the UK.
Museum Moves is supported by DJW Projects Limited: DJW Projects Limited. DJW Projects Limited is recognised as one of the UK’s leading forces in the audio-visual industry, providing creative lighting, Audio Visual and multimedia solutions globally to achieve the ultimate technological experience, using sound, lighting, vision and interaction.
Appointments
Museums Galleries Scotland has appointed Rebecca Bailey, Programme Director of Towards a National Collection, and Conor Jon Ellis, Director of Science Learning and Engagement at Dynamic Earth, as new Members of its Board of Trustees. They join as MGS enters the second year of its Museum Futures programme and begins a refresh of Scotland’s Museums and Galleries Strategy.
The National Videogame Museum has appointed Tracey Johnson as the new chair of trustees of its governing charity, The BGI. Johnson is project director of TECH SY, where she leads initiatives to grow South Yorkshire’s technology sector.
Openings & closures
Kelso Abbey in the Scottish Borders has reopened to visitors for the first time in five years, following conservation work by Historic Environment Scotland, which manages the site.
The Banqueting House, the last surviving piece of former royal residence the Palace of Whitehall, is to be reopened to the public next month.
Exhibitions
Light & Magic: The Birth of Art Photography
Tate Modern | London
Opening: 14 October 2026 – Closing: 21 February 2027
This exhibition is the first major survey to explore Pictorialism as a global photographic movement, tracing its evolution from the 1880s through to the 1960s. Spanning four thematic chapters, it brings together 200 rare vintage prints by over 80 artists working across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia. The exhibition broadens both the geographical and chronological understanding of Pictorialism, examining its relationship to printmaking techniques, international photographic societies, and Modernism.
Drawn from the Archives
Fort George | Inverness
Opening: 1 August 2026 – Closing: 23 November 2026
The exhibition brings together drawings from Historic Environment Scotland’s archives spanning a variety of time periods, including historic maps, archaeological sketches, and artistic works. Highlights include drawings by Christian Maclagan, one of Scotland’s earliest known female archaeologists, and romantic sketches by 19th-century artist James Skene. Four contemporary artworks, commissioned in response to the exhibition’s themes, are also on display alongside the archival pieces.
North Devon’s Home Front Writers, 1937–1945
Museum of Barnstaple and North Devon | Barnstaple
Opening: 25 July 2025 – Closing: 17 October 2025
This exhibition draws on diaries, facsimiles, photographs and artefacts to document everyday life in North Devon during the Second World War. The material originates from thirteen North Devon contributors to Mass Observation, a social research project that recruited volunteer writers across Devon between 1937 and 1946. The exhibition was inspired by the 2025 publication of ‘Devon’s Home Front Diaries, 1937–1945’ by Dr Todd Gray, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.
EVERY THING MUST GO
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery | Birmingham
Opening: 29 July 2026 – Closing: 21 February 2027
Comedian and artist Joe Lycett’s first major solo exhibition features over 80 works across painting, stained glass, photography, ceramics, sculpture and screenprints, inspired by ‘things that are no longer with us’. Subjects range from extinct animals and demolished buildings to deceased celebrities and discontinued chocolate bars, presented in a salon-style format described by the artist as a ‘neon graveyard’. The centrepiece is a near life-size pink woolly mammoth sculpture, ‘Martin from Hull’, hand rugged with British wool by cast members of ‘The Great British Sewing Bee’. Admission is free.
Funding
Worthing Borough Council has agreed a new five-year, multimillion-pound funding package for Worthing Theatres and Museum, running from April 2027 to March 2032. The agreement provides long-term financial certainty for the charity, which welcomed over 250,000 visitors in 2025/26 across its Connaught Theatre, Pavilion Theatre, Assembly Hall and Worthing Museum & Art Gallery.
