“My heart sings,” was how Sheffield artist Grace Clifford described the moment she learned her bronze pub stool had been bought for the Government Art Collection. In Yorkshire, where artists often build serious work with limited cash, shared studio space and plenty of stubborn belief, that reaction lands with some force. The government announcement says works by artists from Yorkshire and the Humber will now be shown in British embassies and government buildings around the world, from Washington DC to Abu Dhabi. For the region, that means work shaped in places like Sheffield, Wakefield and Hull is not just being praised at home; it is being used to represent Britain abroad.

According to the Government Art Collection, ten new works were acquired in the 2025-26 round as part of Art X-UK, a five-year project set up to buy contemporary work from across the country and display it in more than 125 nations. This fourth instalment focused on Yorkshire and the Humber alongside the East of England. There is a simple point here that will not be lost on Northern readers. When public collections look beyond London and the usual gatekeepers, they do more than spread prestige around. They start to show a truer picture of where culture is being made, who is making it and what kinds of lives are worth putting in the frame.

Clifford’s selection feels especially telling. Her work uses everyday objects and industrial materials to push back against easy stereotypes about working-class communities, while drawing on family history, local places and the weight of inheritance. She said the piece would not have happened without the time and space Sheffield gave her to develop her practice, adding that it really did “take a village”. Kedisha Coakley, another Yorkshire artist chosen in the round, made a similar point from a different angle. Her sculptures address colonialism, botany, extraction and Black identity, with a clear aim of making visible histories that are too often missing from public collections. She said having the work acquired was not only recognition, but a chance to add to a “fuller, more complex national story”. Karanjit Panesar was also among the Yorkshire artists selected.

Sam Metz’s inclusion speaks to another side of Yorkshire’s arts scene: the quiet, practical support that allows artists to keep going. Metz said the work sharpened while based at The Art House in Wakefield and that the region’s backing for disabled artists had helped “stimming as creative practice” win proper recognition. Now working from Feral Arts in Hull, Metz pointed to a local community that continues to raise the standard of drawing. That matters because these announcements can easily be dressed up as individual success stories and left there. In reality, they rest on years of studio provision, artist-led spaces, technicians, curators and regional organisations doing the graft. Yorkshire’s contribution is not accidental; it has been built place by place, often with far less attention than comparable work in the capital.

The East of England artists chosen in the same round bring a similar sense of place and lived experience. Issam Kourbaj, born in Syria and based in Cambridge since 1990, makes work about migration, memory and displacement, often using fragile materials and found objects to hold the traces of departure and home. Claire Cansick spoke of the pride of representing Norfolk as a working-class woman from a coastal town that can feel overlooked nationally. Amartey Golding tied his selection to the East’s long histories of resistance and social reform, while Sikelela Owen was also named among the artists acquired. For Yorkshire readers, that wider regional picture will sound familiar. The push is not simply for more art outside London, but for the country to stop treating regional experience as secondary when it decides what counts as national culture.

Arts Minister Ruth Mackenzie said the acquisitions would help artists from Yorkshire and the Humber and the East of England be seen both nationally and internationally. The Government Art Collection, which sits within government, first tested the idea in a 2020-21 pilot before launching the five-year acquisitions programme in 2022. Since then, the collection says it has bought more than 170 works by 80 contemporary visual artists. Those pieces are destined for government buildings across the UK and for ten British embassies and ambassadors’ residences overseas, including sites in Washington DC, Ankara, Abu Dhabi and Paris. Earlier rounds covered Wales and the Midlands, then Scotland and the North East, followed by Northern Ireland and the North West, with the South East and South West due in the final year of the programme.

Regional arts leaders were clear that none of this happens by chance. Sharon Gill of Yorkshire and Humber Visual Art Network said the hardest part was narrowing the nominations because the boost artists get from being collected by the nation should not be underestimated. Paula Orrell of CVAN England argued that the programme shows why regional knowledge matters when public bodies decide whose work enters major collections. That is the part worth sitting with in Yorkshire. A bronze pub stool cast in Sheffield, work developed in Wakefield, practice sustained in Hull and histories carried through Black British and working-class experience are all now part of the way Britain presents itself to the world. For a region that is too often spoken about rather than listened to, that is no small thing.