Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions

Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions at Wellcome Collection is the first museum exhibition dedicated to artist Audrey Amiss (1933–2013) and opens July 2026. The exhibition features drawings, paintings and ephemera and explores Amiss’s work as an artist and campaigner, revealing how she used art to advocate for people who have experienced harmful treatment in the mental health system.

Born in Sunderland, UK, Amiss received a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1950s where she studied painting until a mental health crisis and subsequent encounter with psychiatric treatment prevented her from completing the final year of her course. Although she continued to make, exhibit and sell art, alongside a career in the Civil Service and in retirement, the breadth of her work was not fully known until after her death. Her archive was donated to Wellcome Collection in 2014. 

From the 1950s, Amiss exhibited in artist society group exhibitions and, from the 1980s, organised solo exhibitions. Amiss frequently worked from life, depicting scenes from across London, figurative works and still-lives with loose abstract brushwork and marks. Her vibrant paintings and observational drawings attest to her academic training. She also took part in demonstrations with campaigning and survivor groups, such as Survivors Speak Out and Mad Pride, and exhibited work influenced by her involvement in the psychiatric survivor movement, such as protest signs.  

The Surviving Exhibitions focuses on works that records suggest Amiss exhibited or intended to be made public. Using posters, lists of exhibited artworks and other records, it restages, as far as possible, three of her self-organised exhibitions—Drawings and Watercolours from the 1960s by Audrey Amiss (1989), Fireworks: A Protest Exhibition (1989), and Drawings from a Locked Ward (The Snakepit) (2002).

Sumitra Upham, Associate Director, Curatorial and Public Practice, Wellcome Collection, said, “Despite receiving limited recognition from the art establishment in her lifetime, The Surviving Exhibitions reveals Audrey Amiss to be a talented and prolific artist who exhibited extensively, and who frequently used art as a powerful tool to advocate for others and seek change.

“The exhibition and Audrey Amiss’s archive at Wellcome Collection provide an important counterbalance to a predominantly historical collection, dominated by the voices of medical professionals, by platforming lived experience."

The exhibition was developed in collaboration with lived-experience advisors. It is presented in parallel with Intimacies of Care—Spaces of Grief and Possibility, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Rudy Loewe (b.1987) who creates a space of hope in which they reimagine a mental health system that is equitable and supportive.

Opening this autumn, the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art will stage an exhibition in Amiss's hometown of Sunderland. Rooted in her lifelong connection to the city, it features a selection of works and materials from her archive.