Until May 11, artworks from Tate will be touring around England in a mobile museum staged in a converted truck, and created in collaboration with Art Explora and Mumo.

Artworks by 22 artists will be taken on tour through the Midlands and North of England in the specially curated exhibition “Soup, Socks and Spiders! Art of the Everyday”. The exhibition is an exploration of the still life genre and will challenge viewers to consider how we view the everyday objects in our lives. The show will include works by Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Vanessa Bell and Cornelia Parker.

The tour is visiting the areas of Nuneaton and Bedworth in Warwickshire, Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, Walsall in the West Midlands, Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, Wigan in Greater Manchester, Rotherham in South Yorkshire, and Tarporley in Cheshire. The mobile museum will be stationed in 12 locations for between two and four days. It previously toured around the Liverpool City Region in 2023 with a downsized version of Tate Liverpool’s “Radical Landscapes” exhibition, curated by Darren Pih and Laura Bruni.

School Children from Our Lady & St. Joseph Catholic Academy, February 23 2024. Photo by Fabio De Paola / PA Wire.

The itinerant museum will be visited by community groups, school children and care home residents as well as the general public. Frédéric Jousset, Art Explora’s founder, has called the tour “an opportunity for thousands of people, and especially school children, to experience art for the first time, right on their doorsteps”. Creative workshops will also be scheduled, with resulting artworks displayed in the museum at the end of each stop of the journey.

Mumo—standing for mobile museum—was created by the author Ingrid Brochard and designed by Matali Crasset with the support of the Foundation Daniel et Nina Carasso. Art Explora was founded in 2019 with the aim to “encourage new forms of access, participation and engagement with arts and culture and to push the boundaries of digital technology and mobile programming”. It sponsors prizes for artists and has created workshops, residencies, and its own festival.

Helen Legg, the Director of Tate Liverpool has said that “Tate is proud to be working with Art Explora on the Mobile Museum that will bring artwork from the national collection closer to more people across the country. It is rare that the collection is shown in this way, in non-traditional settings, but it is key if we are to breakdown perceived barriers and bring crucial encounters with art to young people and communities.”