Meanwhile, Windrush in the Far South West will be on display in The Box’s Bridge Gallery from 18 January-5 May 2025. Developed in conjunction with Culture Club, a community group who have been working with The Box for the past 18 months to explore and discover new narratives in its collections, the exhibition explores Plymouth’s little-known links to the migration of people from the Caribbean throughout the mid-1900s.

The project has been supported by a National Lottery Community Fund grant and is set to reveal more about the people who came to the UK to support its rebuilding after the Second World War and their descendants. A combination of archive and contemporary stories and images will provide a fascinating insight into this little-known history.

Osman Yousefzada – When will we be good enough? continues until 9 March 2025. This topical and thought-provoking installation features a range of media including sculpture and textiles, as well as a carefully chosen selection of objects from The Box’s art, natural history and world cultures collections. Yousefzada uses them to tell stories of age-old global power that are just as prevalent today. He draws inspiration from the links between colonial shipping routes and the places where the underwater cables that transmit today’s digital information are laid and suggests that power doesn’t die, it simply reinvents itself. How much power do we ever really hold? How much have things really changed?

Planet Ocean continues until 27 April 2025. The exhibition combines specimens, objects and artworks from The Box’s natural history, art and social history collections at The Box to share facts, key findings, objects and stories; inspiring hope in the face of the climate crisis and empowering visitors to play their part in the global movement to safeguard the sea.

The Box will also reach one million visits during spring 2025 – a phenomenal achievement for an arts and cultural venue in a city with a population of around 260,000 that initially opened during the Covid-19 pandemic, but which has continued to go from strength to strength ever since.

Late spring/summer 2025
Throughout late spring/summer 2025, The Box’s programme celebrates two of the UK’s most exciting artists and one of the most influential artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the 1900s.

Jyll Bradley: Running and Returning
5 April-2 November 2025
Running and Returning is a major survey of the work of English artist and writer Jyll Bradley who has been making work for more than three decades. Her pioneering approach and creativity have resulted in an incredibly broad-ranging practice. Over the years her work has evolved and changed, encompassing drawing, photography, film, poetry and large-scale public artworks. Bradley’s practice combines a minimalist approach with ideas of identity, urbanity, light, cultivation, queerness and community. Whilst it is diverse, there are some themes that she returns to repeatedly, hence the title of this exhibition.

Running and Returning will highlight the diversity of her practice and take visitors on a deeply personal journey. Early photographic self-portraits examine what it was like for Bradley to be a young queer female while Flower Train (2010) focuses on the struggle to make personal, geographic and economic connections through the framework of the flower trade in the south west of England, the region where her adoptive family originate. A selection of lightbox works show how Bradley experimented with ideas of identity in a less prescriptive, more poetic way in the early part of her career, while a series of films explore the search for her birth mother and experience as an adoptee.

Beyond the walls of The Box’s St Luke’s gallery, Bradley’s focus on community and place-making will be brought into focus with large-scale public artwork The Hop (2022). Originally commissioned by the Hayward Gallery, London, this vibrant interactive sculpture connects urban landscapes with rural hop gardens and is set to project a spectrum of colours around The Box’s public square on Tavistock Place throughout the summer months.

Running and Returning will also feature a selection of drawings and maquettes from major public artworks Bradley has created.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major new publication spanning her career to date.

Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes
24 May–7 September 2025
Forbidden Territories marks 100 years of ‘Surrealism’, since its origins in 1924 with the publication of the ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ by the poet and critic André Breton, exploring its influence and the way it continues to inspire artists today.