The Sainsbury Centre has added “museum” and “art” to its name in a rebrand that represents a new direction for the Norwich institution.
The venue will now be called the Sainsbury Museum and Art Centre, reverting to the original name in the organisation’s founding documents in 1973.
Sainsbury Museum and Art Centre director Jago Cooper said: “This is the name that was in the legal deed, which meant that I could go to the board and all the other stakeholders and say, ‘Look, I'm not changing the name, I'm reverting to the original one.’”
Cooper relaunched the museum in 2023 as a home for “living art”, a concept that treats artworks as living, breathing entities rather than static historical objects. The new brand is designed to highlight the venue as a “dynamic international contemporary hub for living art”.
“What we are doing here is genuinely radical, therefore I need people to know what we are,” Cooper said. “With the new brand comes a new font, a new design system, a new tone of voice, and a new way of activating this idea of living art.”
Jago said that the restoration of the institution’s original name highlights its two roles: as a museum that preserves, researches and displays a collection for public education; and as an arts centre that explores contemporary social questions through temporary exhibitions and associated programming.
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The Sainsbury Museum and Art Centre, which was designed by architect Norman Foster, first opened in 1978. Its collection was donated to the University of East Anglia by Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, who wanted to create an new type of museum.
The new logo is based one of Foster’s earliest sketches of Sainsbury Museum and Art Centre, which was the largest open-plan building in the UK at the time. It is also related to the work of German designer Otl Aicher
The creative agency North Design developed the new Sainsbury Museum and Art Centre brand.
North Design director Sean Perkins said: “Building on the legacy of Norman Foster and Otl Aicher was an extraordinary privilege. Architecture and art of this calibre call for a visual identity created with equal rigor and restraint.
“Drawing directly from Foster’s iconic grid and the gallery's vibrant collection, we created an identity that lives and breathes with the museum itself – dynamic, living, and radical across both print and digital.”
This rebrand coincides with the launch of the Sainsbury Museum and Art Centre’s latest series of exhibitions exploring key societal questions. This season, which asks How Do We Find Love?, includes the exhibitions The Last Human Kiss, and Ecstasy and the Aftermath, launching 13 November, and Love Stories, launching 18 December.
The season explores the complexities of human relationships, desire and intimacy, from classical depictions of romantic gestures to contemporary, photographic projects looking at close relationships.
