The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom | Art Gallery | Art Museum | Visual Arts

The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich is one of around a hundred university museums in the United Kingdom which are regularly open to the public. Sir Robert (1906 -2000) and Lady Lisa Sainsbury (1912- ) donated their collection of world art to the University of East Anglia in 1973 and The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts first opened its doors to visitors in 1978. It was the Sainsburys' hope that students, academic staff and the general public would grow to appreciate the works on display in much the same way as the Sainsbury's themselves had done, by being able to look frequently and closely at them without the distraction of too much museum-style text and labelling.
When the Collection was offered to the University in 1973 it numbered around three hundred works but by the time The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts opened five years later in Norman Foster's amazing building in Norwich, three hundred had become six hundred. Now, the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection contains more that one thousand seven hundred objects, and it is still growing. Almost all of the works are on permanent display and they are visited by around forty thousand people each year, as well as being used extensively for teaching by various UEA departments and many local schools and colleges. By the late 1980s the Collection and the staff had outgrown the original building and the Crescent Wing was added, with new office, exhibition and technical spaces. In 2002, to mark his mother's ninetieth birthday, Lord David Sainsbury gave her, and thus the University, the splendid promise of a new gallery linking the two parts of The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, together with new education and studio spaces. These opened to the public in May 2006, making the Collections even more accessible and, in the true spirit of the original gift, available for all to enjoy.