Over recent years, Tate has formed a wide range of strong relationships which are helping us to increase and share our knowledge, extend our reach and achieve more on behalf of our audiences all over the UK and around the world. Because partnerships at home and abroad have become vital to Tate, we are currently devising comprehensive National and International Strategies to ensure that we make the most of the many different kinds of work that we do with others.

Our new National Strategy will be concerned with partnerships in research, communication, training, teaching and more, including loans and exhibitions. We are beginning to tour more exhibitions nationally, and in 2004-05 Art of the Garden1 will go to Manchester and Belfast, while Art and the 60s: This Was Tomorrow2 will visit Birmingham. In the past, national museums sometimes had a reputation for dominating their relationships with regional organisations, but our focus today is on an equal exchange. In this two schemes play a central role - the Tate Partnership Scheme and the Strategic Commissioning Scheme.

The Tate Partnership Scheme, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), was launched in 2000 for a three-year period - an experiment so successful that in 2003 the HLF extended funding for a further two years. Its aim is to broaden access to the Tate Collection via loans, exhibitions, training and development programmes based at five partner galleries3 around the regions. The galleries each select some twenty works a year from the Tate Collection to create exhibitions and displays so that, for example, works by William Blake from Tate have been displayed in Sheffield4 while Abstract Expressionist works have been on show at Norwich5. To date, the five galleries have mounted twenty-six exhibitions, attracting audiences of 650,000. The Scheme has also brought some outstanding loans to Tate, including the extraordinary Great Picture 1646, lent by Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal6 in 2003.

In addition, Tate's partnership programme has benefited from the government's new Strategic Commissioning Scheme, a Department of Culture, Media and Sport initiative supporting national museums and their partners in the regions in running education programmes alongside loans and exhibitions7. In 2004, as part of the next round of strategic commissioning, we will begin an exciting new project working with young people and our colleagues at museums in Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield. The aim is to develop together a new generation of interpretation tools and interactive resources to make learning about art more vivid and enjoyable.

Tate has had a consistently international outlook over the years. We have established relationships in Europe, the USA and around the world. Our collaborations with international museums now include joint acquisitions, as well as substantial overseas loans. Over the biennium, twenty-two Tate exhibitions have toured to more than thirty museums abroad. Among these, five major shows were especially devised for overseas touring through our international programmes. Our international collecting is now extending to regions of the world new to us, and benefits from the efforts of energetic overseas donors and supporters. We also have increasingly strong academic links worldwide.

Today we are touring more exhibitions abroad than ever, and over the past two years Tate shows have travelled to museums in Europe, North and Latin America, Australasia and Asia, with more than a million people seeing them in the last year alone. A highlight was a special exhibition of twentieth-century British art sent to Brazil8, a major event that introduced Tate to new audiences in South America. As many more Tate-generated exhibitions are planned to tour over the next two years, our new international strategy will ensure that we maximise opportunities to promote British art and Tate abroad.

Footnotes

1. Art of the Garden, Tate Britain, 3 June - 30 August 2004. Sponsored by Ernst & Young; touring to the Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1 October - 6 February 2004, and Manchester City Art Galleries 5 March - 15 May 2005
2. Art of the 60s: This Was Tomorrow, Tate Britain, 30 June - 6 September 2004; touring to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 25 October 2004 - 3 April 2005, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, 28 October 2005 - 5 February 2006, and the Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, 25 February - 28 May 2006
3. The Lakeland Arts Trust (Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal and Blackwell House); the New Art Gallery, Walsall; Norwich Castle Museum; the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent; and Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust
4. William Blake: Inspiration and Illustration, Millennium Galleries, Sheffield, August - November 2003
5. Surface Tensions: Abstract Expressionism and Its Influence, Norwich Castle Museum, March - June 2004
6. The Great Picture was commissioned by Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676) to record her life and the history of her family
7. The Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal devised a project based on two major Tate sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Edgar Degas; the New Art Gallery, Walsall borrowed Lucian Freud's Girl with a White Dog for display with their Garman-Ryan Collection; and the Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich, created a project around Norwich Market Place by John Sell Cotman
8. A Bigger Splash: British Art from Tate 1960-2003, mounted in São Paulo, Brazil, August - October 2003

Installation view, Norwich Castle's Surface Tensions - Abstract Expressionism and its Influence, showing Mark Rothko Untitled circa 1950-2