Yorkshire Sculpture Park
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The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is an open-air art organisation, showing work by UK and international artists, including notably Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
The park is located in West Bretton, Wakefield, in West Yorkshire, England. Opening times are seasonal but typically the grounds are open 10:00–17:00 with indoor galleries open 11:00–15:00 during exhibitions (full details are available on the website). A pay-and-display car park is available.
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) was founded in 1977 by the current Director Peter Murray. It is a charity and registered museum, although its own collection is a very small part of the works on display and does not have an active acquisition policy. Most works on display are on loan from private or public collections. YSP receives public funding for its running costs - largely from Arts Council England, but also from Wakefield council. Its recent capital developments (including a new visitor centre and gallery complexes in the Bothy garden and at Longside) received Arts Council, Lottery and European funding.
YSP is conceived on the model of a 'gallery without walls' - that means it has a changing (albeit not always very regularly) exhibition programme, rather than permanent display as seen in other UK sculpture parks such as Grizedale Forest and Goodwood Sculpture Park. It was the UK's first sculpture park - although it was based on the temporary open air exhibitions organised in London parks from the 1940s to 1970s by the Arts Council and London County Council (and later Greater London Council).
Since the 1990s YSP has also made use of a variety of indoor exhibition spaces, initially a Bothy Gallery (in the curved Bothy Wall) and a temporary tent-like structure called the Pavilion Gallery. More recently - following an extensive refurbishment and expansion - YSP has added a major underground gallery space in the Bothy garden, and exhibition spaces at Longside (the hillside facing the original park). Its programme consists of contemporary and Modern sculpture (from Rodin and Bourdelle through to younger living artists). British sculpture is particularly well represented in the past exhibition programme and semi-permanent displays. Many of the British sculptors famous in the 1950s and 1960s, but later forgotten, have been the subject of solo exhibitions at YSP including Lynn Chadwick, Austin Wright, Philip King, Eduardo Paolozzi, Kenneth Armitage. Exhibitions tend to be monographic - rather than group or thematic.
The Park is situated in the grounds of an 18th century estate (Bretton Hall) which was a family home until mid 20th century when it became a College of Further and Higher Education. Various follies, landscape features and architectural structures dating from the 18th century can still be seen around the Park including a deer park and deer shelter (recently converted by American sculptor James Turrell into an installation), an ice house, a Camelia house. Artists working at YSP often take their inspiration from either the architectural, historical or natural environment.
