First museum exhibition of the artist and mental health campaigner Audrey Amiss, using her archive of 50,000 sketchbook pages at the Wellcome Collection.
Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions is on at Wellcome Collection in Gallery 2, running from 10 July 2026 to 7 February 2027. It's the first museum exhibition dedicated to Audrey Amiss (1933-2013), an artist and campaigner who worked in almost every medium despite the obstacles she faced.
Born in Sunderland, Amiss won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1950s, but a mental health crisis and psychiatric treatment stopped her from completing her final year. She didn't stop there, though; she continued to make, exhibit and sell art alongside a long career in the Civil Service. Between the 1950s and 2000s, she was detained under mental health law on at least 11 occasions, and she spent much of her life campaigning for reform, attending demonstrations, writing to policymakers and working within the mental health survivor movement.
Her archive, which was donated to Wellcome Collection in 2014, fills an estimated 50,000 sketchbook pages. She showed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1957 and 1958, hung at least 54 works at the Mall Galleries between the 1960s and 1990s, and staged solo shows including Fireworks: A Protest Exhibition in 1989 and Drawings from a Locked Ward in 2002. This exhibition brings that work together in one place.
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Entry is free, and with the show running until early February, you've plenty of time to fit it in. It's in Gallery 2 at Wellcome Collection, London.
