After nearly a decade at the helm, Maria Balshaw will leave her post as Director of Tate next spring, closing out a tenure that has steered the institution through expansion, turbulence, and no small amount of debate about what a national museum should be in the 21st century.
Balshaw arrived in 2017 — Tate’s first female director — with a clear mandate to pull the place closer to the public it supposedly serves. Early on, she delivered one of the most widely discussed projects of the decade: Year 3, Steve McQueen’s mass portrait of London schoolchildren. For weeks, their faces beamed across Tate Britain and billboards around the capital, a rare moment when the museum felt knitted back into the everyday life of the city rather than floating above it.
In the years that followed, Balshaw pushed Tate’s programme into territories that had previously been treated as peripheral. Landmark exhibitions such as Women in Revolt, Life Between Islands, Emily Kam Kngwarray and Leigh Bowery suggested a conscious rebalancing of who gets to be placed at the centre of the story. Even the quieter shows — Yoko Ono, Isaac Julien, the recent Turner & Constable pairing — seemed designed to jolt the canon rather than simply dust it.
Behind the scenes, she worked on Tate’s unruly collection with similar intent. More women, more artists from the Global South, and more room for practices long treated as minor — textiles, ceramics, indigenous traditions — all entered the fold. A museum that once clung tightly to the 20th-century Anglo-European script has, under Balshaw, edged toward a more porous, less complacent worldview.
But numbers matter too, and Balshaw proved adept at building them. Tate’s membership swelled to 150,000, and Tate Collective — her overture to younger audiences — now claims 180,000 members aged 16–25. The global partnerships expanded as well, sending works from the collection on tour and drawing in international funding at a time when public support for museums continues to shrink.
She also used her platform to champion regional museums — not a glamorous task, but a necessary one as years of austerity hollowed out local cultural infrastructure. Her work with the National Museum Directors Council secured vital maintenance and emergency funds, even as many institutions outside London struggled to stay open.
Balshaw’s legacy will linger physically in the shape of two major capital projects: the new Clore Garden at Tate Britain, opening in 2026, and the full overhaul of Tate Liverpool set for 2027. There is also the long-awaited renovation of the Palais de Danse in St Ives, once Barbara Hepworth’s studio. And then there is the endowment — more than £50m raised so far — a safety net Tate has never had before.
Fittingly, her final major act will be curatorial rather than managerial: a career-spanning Tracey Emin exhibition at Tate Modern, opening February 2026. “My greatest thrill has always been to work closely with artists,” Balshaw said, calling this a return to her “first love.”
Roland Rudd, Chair of Tate, described her as a “trailblazer,” though critics — inside and outside the building — may remember the last decade as more complicated, defined as much by the pressures facing public museums as by any single director’s vision. Yet few would dispute that Tate now looks outward in ways that were unthinkable a generation ago. Balshaw didn’t achieve that alone, but she undoubtedly accelerated it.
The search for her successor begins at a moment when British museums are navigating ideological battles, shrinking budgets, and a public increasingly sceptical of institutional authority. Whoever takes the role next will inherit a museum with expanded ambitions but no shortage of challenges — a baton Balshaw passes on with the institution energetically, if uneasily, in motion.