In little over a decade, the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands has grown from a temporary exhibition space into the custodian of more than 400 national artworks and counting.
The museum is now responsible for preserving not only the collection itself, but the Caymanian history and culture they represent.
Doing so in a humid, hurricane-prone environment presents additional challenges for the gallery’s conservation team.
National Gallery director Natalie Urquhart told Cayman Independent that once artworks enter the collection, the museum has a duty to preserve them for the long term, potentially hundreds of years.
“We have this added, really core commitment now to caring for a growing art collection in an environment that is increasingly challenged with extreme weather conditions,” she said.
As the collection expands, preservation is increasingly top of mind for Urquhart, whose team has been tasked with protecting the holdings, not just from hurricanes but heat, flooding and fire.
By a conservative count, the gallery’s collection has more than tripled in a little over a decade, growing from 117 works in 2013 to 426 in 2025.
A donation made late last year from collector Virginia Foster added an additional 69 heritage craft objects, which counted as a single collection.
Itemised piece by piece, however, those objects bring the holding close to 500 works – more than quadrupling the 2013 count.
A maturing collection
Growth on that scale – driven largely by donations – has pushed the museum’s mission and its standards to evolve.
Until the gallery moved into its purpose-built home in 2012, it was, in Urquhart’s telling, largely a temporary exhibition space running a few shows a year.
What followed was a deliberate effort to build a permanent national collection, tracing the story of Caymanian art from the islands’ craft traditions to the formal visual arts sector that began to emerge in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Caring for these works has required the museum to not just understand the local landscape, but to understand global standards as well.
As a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the gallery is in a continuous process of evaluating and updating how its collection is protected.
This requires consideration of everything from air conditioning and climate control, including the environmental impact of cooling systems, to provenance checks that ensure an acquired work hasn’t been the subject of theft.
Urquhart recently completed a term as a trustee on the ICOM UK board, allowing her to deliver the latest insight from the global standard-setting body to Cayman.
The museum also collaborates with Hazard Management Cayman Islands and the Ministry of Culture to keep its emergency response procedures up to date.
Urquhart’s forward-thinking vision has allowed her to position the museum as a leader in collection care and preservation in Cayman.
“Looking at this holistically, definitely working with our neighbouring institutions to build shared mechanisms, knowledge and resources around our collections is an exciting new commitment and opportunity that is in discussion,” Urquhart said.
Within the government and the community, she sees the understanding of this responsibility growing.
“We’re really beginning to prioritise care for traditional historic structures in a much more strategic, holistic way in the last few years, understanding that once these things are lost, they’re gone forever,” she said.
Preservation for future generations
Work remains, however, to ensure Urquhart’s long-term goal – a national art collection preserved in perpetuity.
To achieve this, the team’s ongoing, daily responsibilities require regular inspections of the artwork, including condition reporting, photographing objects, rewrapping them in acid-free archival paper, and updates to both digital and physical files.
In the near future, storage will also become a topic of discussion. The museum’s 2025 annual report notes that, with the growth of the collection, the institution has outgrown its storage space, requiring expansion last year into an additional cold storage unit.
To properly accommodate the expanded collection, one important goal, the report notes, will be construction of a purpose-built, hurricane-proofed storage facility for the museum.
In the meantime, the gallery is making efforts to push outward.
Works from the museum’s collection already hang at Owen Roberts International Airport, the Government Administration Building and the Health Services Authority, and travel to satellite venues in Cayman Brac and Little Cayman.
Later this year, Urquhart said, the gallery will launch a campaign to bring the collection further into the community.
She could not reveal the details, but suggested the public keep an eye on the spaces around them.
After all, sharing the work with the community, she noted, matters as much as caring for it.
