The Public Catalogue Foundation

Art UK is an art education charity on a mission to make the art in UK public collections accessible to everyone, for enjoyment, learning and research. The organisation enables global audiences to learn about the UK’s national art collection. It does this by digitising artworks, telling the stories behind the art, creating schools learning resources and offering exciting opportunities for public interaction with art, both online and offline.

Over 90% of the UK’s national art collection is not on public view, and until Art UK started its work much of this art had not been photographed. The charity’s work is helping to radically change this, making what is publicly owned, publicly accessible – to anyone, anywhere. Art UK plays a major role supporting public art collections by improving their accessibility and sustainability.

The platform currently shows over 750,000 artworks by 70,000 artists and is an ambitious collaboration between almost 3,500 institutions, making it one of the largest arts partnerships put together in the UK. The website is rich in story content, public engagement opportunities and learning resources where we have a particular focus on improving the visual literacy of school children through our Superpower of Looking programme. In the last 12 months over 5.7m people used the Art UK website, with 60% from overseas. Art UK does not have an equivalent anywhere in the world.