We’re delighted to announce our new podcast series, Hear, Now. Each episode this season joins Whitechapel Gallery curators in dialogue with artists, collaborators and thinkers about ongoing exhibitions and the stories behind them. You can now listen to Episode One, featuring Curator Laura Smith in conversation with British painter Gary Hume. The duo discuss the selection of artworks from the Hiscox Collection for Hume's current display, Accelerate your escape. Head to our website or Soundcloud to listen #linkinbio

Applications for The London Open 2021 Call for entries are now open! This is your opportunity to exhibit your work at Whitechapel Gallery in The London Open 2021, a triennial exhibition that showcases the vibrancy and diversity of the capital’s art scene. ☞ Apply now and find out more about the Call for entries  #linkinbio Artworks submitted for The London Open can be in any medium, including painting, sculpture, moving image, photography, drawing, performances, and installations. Applications for the Call for entries close on Friday 27th November 2020.

We are proud to continue to be #HereForCulture and are thrilled to share with you that we have received vital funding thanks to the government's #CultureRecoveryFund. This award recognises the significant role the Whitechapel Gallery plays in the cultural landscape of London, the UK and internationally and will ensure that we can continue to engage with our vibrant communities of local residents, visitors, artists, members and partners. #HereForCulture Iwona Blazwick, Director says: The Cultural Recovery Fund offers a vital lifeline of support for Whitechapel Gallery and a further 1,384 arts organisations across the UK. We are delighted and relieved to receive £534,000 from Arts Council England to reflate our reserves. With this we can plan for a secure future for the Gallery, with the continued upkeep of our historic building, innovation in our programmes, and commitment to engaging local, national and international audiences. Now more than ever cultural organisations have a crucial role to play, offering healing, inspiration and hope in tackling the economic and environmental challenges of the future. #HereForCulture #CultureRecoveryFund #dcmsgovuk #aceagrams @aceagrams @ukhmtreasury @dcmsgovuk Duchamp & Sons Youth Takeover with artist Rosie Ridgway during A Night at Whitechapel Gallery. Schools Workshop during Elmgreen & Dragset: This is how we bite our tongue at Whitechapel Gallery, 2018. Mikhail Karikis, No Ordinary Protest, 2018. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Video Still. Courtesy Mikhail Karikis. Whitechapel Gallery facade, 2019, Photo: Anthony Coleman

If you’re taking a walk around London this weekend, keep an eye out for the next series of #ArtInTheHeart2020 posters, bringing imaginative environments to the East End. What do you do to escape the everyday? For British painter Gary Hume, both making and viewing art provide a means of escape. This autumn, Hume selects important works from the Hiscox Collection for his exhibition, Accelerate your escape. As we think about art's ability to transport us elsewhere, we're highlighting works in Hume's display that take us to unexpected faraway places - including Etel Adnan's colourfully painted environments. Writer and artist Etel Adnan is widely known for her poetry, novels and plays as well as her painting. Her recent work is painted from memory, featuring landscapes distilled into their definitive features: like after-images of an experience that remain particularly vivid. Find out more about the artworks from #ArtInTheHeart2020 on our website #linkinbio Etel Adnan, Pink Whale, 2017, Gravure. © Etel Adnan / Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co

Are you an artist or collective living and working in London aged 26 or over? This is your opportunity to exhibit your work at Whitechapel Gallery in The London Open 2021, a triennial exhibition that showcases the vibrancy and diversity of the capital’s art scene. Selected by an esteemed selection panel, artworks submitted for The London Open can be in any medium, including painting, sculpture, moving image, photography, drawing, performances and installations. Since 1932 the Whitechapel Gallery’s open submission exhibition has been a launch pad for leading contemporary artists in the early stages of their career including Larry Achiampong, Frank Bowling, Alice Channer, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry, Heather Phillipson and Rachel Whiteread. Applications for The London Open 2021 open on Friday 16 October! Head to our website to find out more #linkinbio

We're delighted to announce our new MA Curating Art & Public Programmes which we run in association with London South Bank University. It trains emerging curators in an immersive one-year, full-time course that offers hands-on experience at Whitechapel Gallery. The distinctive curriculum offers a one-of-a-kind, integrative experience in working in the field of contemporary art, developing exhibitions and multi-disciplinary and inclusive public programmes. Students are introduced to specialised aspects of curatorial practice through dedicated lectures and workshops delivered by forward-thinking professionals, including sessions such as Commissioning Contemporary Art, Writing about Contemporary Art, Navigating the Art World, Curating Archives, Networked Curating and The Museum and its Ethics. Find out more and start your application now #linkinbio Materiality Will Be Rethought by Joe Moran presented in the exhibition Something Necessary and Useful by Carlos Bunga. Commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery and produced by Dance Art Foundation. Dancers: Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Thomas Heyes and Sean Murray. Photography: Camilla Greenwell.

Home: Live > In Room, explores ideas of home as a place of confinement and introspection but also seeks to map home as a space where we project our fantasies and fragmented thoughts. You are invited to experience a darker, violently real home, and a dreamlike, imagined home drawn from lived realities. These are captured on a soundtrack by Whitechapel Gallery’s Youth collective, Duchamp & Sons, through a collection of personal stories, voices and images. Listen to the soundtrack on our Soundcloud #linkinbio and find out more about the exhibition on our website. Duchamp & Sons Digital Curating workshop, 2020, Image: Whitechapel Gallery

New exhibitions this season means new collaborations with our neighbouring East End galleries! . For the October edition of First Thursdays online, we’re delighted to be partnering with @endofthelineldn who present a live painting session with muralist @jimvision, @scan_arte who host a virtual tour of their current aquatic-inspired group show, @theoldbankvault who invite visitors into the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and @veloroselondon who share a series of postcard artworks in celebration of Black History Month. . Find out more about this month’s First Thursday galleries and their exhibitions on our blog #linkinbio . Jim Vision, Colourful Women, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Elena Aitzkoa, Cisne, 2018, Cloth, plaster, handkerchiefs, dried yarrow flowers, oil and pigment powder. Pola Voiznik, from the series S-A-H Marion Flanagan, Windows as Political Protest (1, 2, 3) (Triptych of Postcards sent to Velorose from Highgate sequentially over three days in June 2020), Photographs Printed on Paper with Gesso, on Recycled Card, Unique, Not for Sale.

Opening on 7 Oct, Kai Althoff's first institutional show in Great Britain featuring works by Bernard Leach. Presented across three galleries, the show looks closely at paintings, works on paper and ephemera that tell stories and depict things that from Althoff's mind, everyone can understand as they speak of the human condition. During the planning of the show, the artist talked of Bernard Leach and his deeply rooted love for his work. After all, Kai Althoff says, would he not have become what he is now, he would have pursued being a potter… Instead, he has always been drawing and painting, making things including music – yet never a “pot proper”. Head to our website to find out more about Kai Althoff goes with Bernard Leach and pre-book your visit now #linkinbio

Looking back at the 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at London’s Royal Academy of Arts which took the art world by storm, the current archive show The Return of the Spirit in Painting asks; Was this show revolutionary or reactionary? Was it a corrective to the anti-aesthetic art of the 1970s? Or was it, as critic Benjamin Buchloh claimed, a reaffirmation of ‘the politics of a rigid conservatism’? The Return of the Spirit in Painting closes this weekend. Don't miss seeing works by artists in the original shows, including Georg Baselitz, Bruce McLean and Julian Schnabel, as well as significant archive material from the Whitechapel Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. Pre-book your ticket now #linkinbio The Return of the Spirit in Painting, 2020, installation view. Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery

Whitechapel Gallery Writer in Residence Himali Singh Soin shares the fourth text from ancestors of the blue moon, a collection of flash fictions written from the perspective of remote or forgotten deities. "A comet spun out of orbit and swung towards the sun, releasing vapour, burning before it barely lived, like a mayfly, completing its life’s work in the span of one full day on earth. It singed into the water, and a lotus bloomed." Read the full text on our website #linkinbio Still from as grand as what (2018-2021), courtesy of Himali Singh Soin

Opening on Oct 7 the new archive display, Exercising Freedom: Encounters with Art, Artists and Communities, focuses on the Whitechapel Gallery’s community education programme from 1979 to 1989, exploring the role that art plays in society. Co-curated with the Gallery's former Education Organiser, Jenni Lomax, the exhibition explores a transformative moment in art education against the convulsive backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain. Find out more about what walking through the doors of the Whitechapel Gallery in the late 1970s felt like on our website and pre-book your tickets now #linkinbio School groups at the Eva Hesse exhibition, May 4 – June 17 1979, Whitechapel Gallery. Whitechapel Gallery Archive.