About the Gallery
Oriel y Bont gallery
The University of Glamorgan has had registered museum status since 2001. In 2009 it was awarded full museum status in recognition of the additional work done over a number of years. It is awarded by MLA, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which is based in London and which is administered through the Aberystwyth-based CyMAL (Museums Archives and Libraries Wales).
We are only the second University in Wales to gain this status. This is a major achievement for the University of Glamorgan which acknowledges the sustained quantitative and qualitative development of its art collection and related activities which focus upon the visual culture of south Wales since 1945.
It raises the profile and enlarges the stature of the University of Glamorgan within Wales and beyond. It enhances the portfolio and overall look of our institution. Artworks from the University of Glamorgan Art Collection Museum are displayed across the Treforest and Glyntaff campuses, radiating out from the Oriel y Bont gallery, Tŷ Crawshay, which hosts a programme of museum exhibitions and changing exhibitions of contemporary art. The aim is to extend the art collection displays to our Cardiff and Merthyr sites.
You can see our collection on the BBC Your Paintings website
It provides a unique educational and cultural resource, and a strong sense of contemporary and historical place and identity, for not only our own art students but also those students of ours who are engaged with other subjects. It affords the same to all our university staff and the various types of university visitors (including teachers, students and the general public) from the immediate locality and further afield.
Dr Ceri Thomas, curator of the University of Glamorgan Art Collection Museum
Image: Ystrad Rhondda (1957) by Ernest Zobole, oil on canvas