Ben Uri Gallery & Museum

Benuri.org - is the first full scale virtual Gallery/Museum and Research Centre addressing the universal issues of identity and migration through art.
It includes 40 exhibitions, 150 films, 80 podcasts, 1400 artworks and much more. Ben Uri was founded by a Russian Jewish immigrant artist in 1915 in Whitechapel in the East End of London. It was the first British Jewish cultural institution and the centre of cultural engagement for two waves of immigration - the first pre WW1 from Russia and the second pre and post WW11 from Central Europe escaping or surviving the Holocaust. It became effectively homeless in 1996 when the gallery closed. In 2001 a new Board set a transformative strategy to operate in the mainstream of British culture. In 2015 Ben Uri celebrated its centenary with the blockbuster collection exhibition, 'Out of Chaos', at Somerset House where it broke all attendance records with some 30,000 visitors. In 2017 the Trustees embarked on a further, exhaustive, long-term focused options analysis based on the recognition that the current gallery would never be sustainable and the museum/charity could not raise the £30-50m necessary to acquire (and then fund the running costs of) a well located, appropriately sized building needed to be sustainable. In 2018, after rigorous stress testing, the Trustees published its Sustainability and Public Benefits Strategy which craved an enlightened operating formula for how this (and other?) small and medium-sized museums (representing 82% of the UK's 3,500 museums) can be financially sustainable ongoing and deliver distinctive public benefit. The successful result, launched in September 2000, after 20 months of designing and planning content development, is the first full-scale virtual (art) museum encompassing all the traditional content and more but multiplied in quantum: e.g. 40 exhibitions at any one time, 100 films etc and the Research Centre for the recording of the Jewish and immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900 alongside the Arts and Health Institute for the study and dissemination of cost, and recipient, effective art interventions using our collection as its source. The future is digital - our future is benuri.org
Operating as usual