Ben Uri Gallery
The London Jewish Museum of Art

Short History and Mission Statement A Museum for Everyone Bridging Communities through Art.

Ben Uri Gallery is Britain’s oldest Jewish cultural organisation. It was founded by Lazar Berson in 1915 in London’s East End as an art society to provide support for Jewish artists and crafts people who were working in the face of poverty, anti-semitism and isolation from the mainstream. It was named after Bezalel Ben Uri the craftsman who designed and built the Ark of the Covenant in biblical times.

It is Europe’s only dedicated Jewish Museum of Art, working in partnership with secular and Jewish Museums in the UK and internationally.

The gallery and museum is an educational institution dedicated to enhancing the quality of life of all whom it impacts. It embraces a new broad and fully inclusive role for museums in today’s society and addresses contemporary issues through art and its social history.

By fostering easy access, greater appreciation and both social and academic enjoyment of the visual arts, there is an ongoing opportunity to demonstrate its value as a robust and unique bridge between the cultural, religious, political differences and beliefs of our fellow citizens.

Its purpose is to enable the largest possible audience, drawn from the widest possible communities from both home and abroad, to explore for inspiration, learning and enjoyment, the work, lives and contribution of British and European artists of Jewish descent, placed where relevant alongside their non-Jewish contemporaries, within the artistic and social context of the national cultural heritage. Through this wide and open outreach ‘A Museum for Everyone Bridging Communities through Art’ is achieved.

Its principal route to achieving this is by enabling broad, easy and straightforward physical and visual access - through location, publication, Internet and outreach - to the following:

  • The Permanent Collection: the largest of its kind in the world, accessed physically or virtually via continued exhibition, research, conservation and acquisition.
  • Temporary Exhibitions: curating, touring and hosting important internationally-focused exhibitions of the widest artistic appeal that, without the museum’s focus, would not be seen in the UK. Kids always Free!
  • Publications: commissioning new academic research on the artists and their historical context to accompany the museum’s exhibitions.
  • Library and Archive: a resource dating from the turn of the 20th century, documenting and tracing in parallel the artistic and social development of the Ben Uri and Jewish artists working or exhibiting in Britain as part of the evolving British historical landscape.
  • Education Programmes: for adults, students, school children and artists, through symposia, lectures, student teaching packs, visits, after school art clubs, free family art days.
  • Artists: Monthly artist peer group programmes, Ben Uri International Jewish Artists of the Year Awards competition, guidance and affiliation benefits.
  • Care in the Community: through the pioneering pilot project between the Ben Uri and the British Association of Art Therapists.
  • Website: providing an on-line educational and access tool, to function as a virtual gallery and artists’ reference resource for students, collectors and scholars.

To continue our objectives and fulfill the museum’s potential Ben Uri desperately needs to relocate to the heart of Central London and is currently seeking c2000 sq m. to establish a permanent museum and exhibition space that will be both an international centre of scholarship and an exciting hub of activity for our local communities.

Important and Major exhibitions include:

Sir Jacob Epstein (1980), Mark Gertler (1982), Jacob Kramer (1984), Solomon J Solomon RA (1990), Abram Games (1991), Claude Rogers (1992) Bernard Cohen (1994), The Ben Uri Story (2001), Bernard Meninsky (2001), Ludwig and Else Meidner (2002), Mark Gertler (2002), Making Waves (2003), The Tortoise and the Hare (2003), Director's Choice (2003), A Storm in Europe: Béla Kádár, Hugó Scheiber and Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin (2003), The Modern and the New (2004), Rediscovering Wolmark: a pioneer of British modernism (2004), Abram Games (2005) Chagall and his Circle (2005), Joash Woodrow (2005)