February 2023
To support the acquisition of works by museums across the UK, Jonathan Anderson conceived the JW Anderson Collections Fund. JW Anderson will award a fund of £50,000 annually to a collecting institution to acquire works by artists who are under-represented in UK collections.
"I’ve always loved visiting collections in the UK and draw a huge amount of inspiration from them. They are the heart of any institution and make each museum unique. As funding to build these collections in the UK becomes increasingly limited, I wanted to find a way to make sure museums can continue to grow, in particular by looking at the work of emerging artists or those who aren’t well represented in collections across the country."
Jonathan Anderson
The Hepworth Wakefield is the inaugural recipient of the JW Anderson Collections Fund.
The first work to be acquired through the fund for The Hepworth Wakefield collection is The Sentimentality of Nature (2022), a large-scale charcoal drawing by Jake Grewal. In his intimate drawings and paintings Grewal explores the relationship between queer bodies and the natural world, expressing ‘autobiographical experiences within the language of Romanticism.’ The work will go on display at The Hepworth Wakefield from spring 2023. The award of the JW Anderson Collections fund to The Hepworth Wakefield builds on the museum’s longstanding relationship with JW Anderson, which began with the 2017 exhibition Disobedient Bodies: JW Anderson Curates The Hepworth Wakefield, curated by Jonathan Anderson.
The second work to be acquired through the fund for The Hepworth Wakefield collection is A snake came to my coffee table on a hot, hot day to drink there by Andrew Cranston (2023). The painting features what Cranston says is ‘an intrusion of something alien into the familiar, an unlikely presence and threat into the domestic’. is the painting A snake came to my coffee table on a hot, hot day to drink there by Andrew Cranston (b. 1969). Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969, and now lives and works in Glasgow. He studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and then completed his postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art