The National Portrait Gallery, the Manchester Museum and the Young V&A are among the contenders for this year’s museum of the year award, as institutions that have undergone extensive renovations and reappraised their collections dominate the shortlist.
In recent years, the prize has been praised for moving away from focusing on attention-grabbing capital projects, but this year museums that have invested in multimillion-pound facelifts make up most of the shortlist.
The National Portrait Gallery’s £41.3m makeover, for which it closed for three years and re-emerged with Tracey Emin-commissioned doors that serve as the new entrance, has been recognised by the judging panel.
The Manchester Museum, which reopened after a £15m refit in 2022, is also in the running, while the Young V&A in east London underwent a refurbishment that cost £13m and is in contention.
Along with those three institutions, the 2024 Art Fund museum of the year prize will be contested by the Craven Museum in Skipton, the market town at the foot of the Yorkshire Dales, and Dundee Contemporary Arts, which is celebrating its 25th year.
The winning museum will be awarded £120,000 at a ceremony at the National Gallery in London on 10 July, while the runners-up will each be given £15,000.
The Guardian’s architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, called the National Portrait Gallery refurb “an astonishing revamp that has turned this once unloved London landmark into a great building”, while he wrote that the V&A’s transformation meant the “cobwebs have been truly blown away” at the historic institution.
Speaking on behalf of the judges, Jenny Waldman, the director of Art Fund, said the list showed museums that were at “the top of their game” and represented the great variety in the sector “across location, scale and topic”.
She added: “It’s a fantastic moment to recognise that we have got a diverse range of museums which are inventive, imaginative and resilient. But it’s also a moment of inflection, to look at what we stand to lose if local authorities and national government do not prioritise investment in heritage and cultural spaces that we have.”
Last week, the mounting costs museums are facing and the possibility of admissions fees being introduced at some of the most prestigious institutions were being discussed.
Waldman told the Sunday Times that investment in museums was “contracting in a very worrying way”, adding that in such an environment people started looking for new ways to generate income and “inevitably, admission charges start being talked about”.
The Art Fund director added that the shortlist showed the resourcefulness of the sector in “an extremely challenging funding environment”, while adding that Craven and Dundee were examples of museums that had been supported by local authorities.
The director of Art Fund attributed the fact three of the five shortlisted museums had undergone big capital projects to the delays caused by the Covid pandemic, but also said the works had allowed the institutions to reappraise their collections and work with local communities to decide how to present them.
The Manchester Museum’s revamp included a new south Asian gallery, a partnership with the British Museum, which is co-curated by 31 people from Manchester’s south Asian diaspora – who were “just ordinary folk, not museum folk,” according to its director, Esme Ward.
Last year’s winner was the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, which was praised after it reopened in 2022 after an extensive renovation to house the 9,000-object collection of Sir William Burrell and his wife, Constance Burrell, who were avid art collectors.