The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom’s national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art. It is a network of four art museums and a complementary website. One of the Tate’s most publicised art events is the awarding of the annual Turner Prize, which takes place at Tate Britain.
The gallery is situated on Millbank, on the site of the former Millbank Prison in London. Construction, undertaken by Higgs and Hill, commenced in 1893, and the gallery opened on 21 July 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art. However, from the start it was commonly known as the Tate Gallery, after its founder Sir Henry Tate, and in 1932 it officially adopted that name. Before 2000, the gallery housed and displayed both British and modern collections, but the launch of Tate Modern saw Tate’s modern collections move there, while the old Millbank gallery became dedicated to the display of historical and contemporary British art. As a consequence, it was renamed Tate Britain in March 2000. Tate Britain has attempted to reach out to a different and younger audience with Late at Tate Britain on the first Friday of every month, with half-price admission to exhibitions, live music and performance art. Other public involvement has included the display of visitors’, as opposed to curators’, interpretation of certain artworks. Tate Britain is the national gallery of British art from 1500 to the present day. As such, it is the most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world. Only the Yale Center for British Art can claim similar expansiveness, but with less depth.
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery and Britain’s national gallery of international modern art. It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year. It is based in the former Bankside Power Station, in the Bankside area of the London Borough of Southwark. Tate holds the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art from 1900 until today. The main collection displays consist of 4 wings each taking up approximately half a complete floor of the main building. Each wing has a named theme or subject. Within each wing there are some rooms that change periodically showing different works in keeping with the overall theme or subject of the wing.
Tate Liverpool is an art gallery and museum in Liverpool, Merseyside. The museum was an initiative of the Merseyside Development Corporation. Tate Liverpool was created to display work from the Tate Collection which comprises the national collection of British art from the year 1500 to the present day, and international modern art. The gallery also has a programme of temporary exhibitions. Until 2003, Tate Liverpool was the largest gallery of modern and contemporary art in the UK outside of London.
The gallery opened in 1988 and is housed in a converted warehouse within the Albert Dock on Liverpool’s waterfront. The original conversion was done by James Stirling but the building was given a major refurbishment in 1998 to create additional gallery space. In 2007, the foyer area was redesigned by architects Arca to create an updated appearance and better proportions, as well as to improve visitor handling. The centrepiece of the space is a new timber desk with an undulating orange fascia, which links to the retained colour scheme of the original conversion work by Stirling. A colour-changing wall acts as a backdrop to the simplified brick volume, visible from across Albert Dock. Behind the scenes, the architects also made alterations to the hospitality, cloakroom, events and education areas.
Tate St Ives is an art gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, exhibiting work by modern British artists. The Tate also manages another, earlier, property in St Ives, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden which it opened in 1980. The three-storey building, designed by architects Evans and Shalev, lies on the site of an old gas works, overlooking Porthmeor Beach.
An extension to the gallery has been proposed in response to the large numbers of visitors the gallery attracts, with the aims of providing better education spaces and accommodating larger works of art. The plans have met with fierce objections from some parts of the local community. On 20 July 2010, Cornwall Council successfully bought the land for the proposed extension from the Penwith Housing Association which has pledged to use the money to build more homes for elderly people in the town.
Tate Online is the Tate’s web site. Since its launch in 1998, the site has provided information on all four physical Tate galleries under the same domain. Tate Online helps visitors prepare and extend visits to the physical sites but also acts as a destination in its own right. Other resources include illustrated information on all works in Tate’s Collection of British and Modern international art, structured and informal e-learning opportunities for all visitors, over 600 hours of archived webcast events, all articles from the magazine Tate Etc., and a series of bespoke net art commissions.
In addition to providing information about the galleries and organisation, Tate Online has been used as a platform for Internet art exhibits, termed Net Art, which are organised as part of Tate’s Intermedia Art initiative covering new media art. So far, 13 net art exhibitions have been shown since the initiative started in 2000 including Tate in Space (2002) which was nominated in the Interactive Art category for the 2003 BAFTA Interactive awards.
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom’s national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art. It is a network of four art museums and a complementary website. One of the Tate’s most publicised art events is the awarding of the annual Turner Prize, which takes place at Tate Britain. 
