Tamara Winikoff OAM announced this week that she will resign as executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), the Australian visual arts sector’s national advocacy group.
“As an arts activist and campaigner I have had to navigate some fascinating challenges because the environment for the arts in Australia is very volatile,” says Winikoff. “But that is what has kept me addicted for so long.”
Winikoff is well known and much appreciated in the field. In 2004 she was awarded the Australia Council’s Visual Arts/Craft Emeritus Medal for outstanding achievement and contribution to the visual arts and crafts. In 2014 she as awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for her contribution to the arts sector.
“Looking back over the years, I feel tremendously proud of what our small, committed, expert organisation has achieved on behalf of Australian arts and artists,” Winikoff recalls. “It has been a joy and a privilege to support the brilliant work of Australia’s cultural creators and the essential contribution they make to articulating the things that matter with such skill and potency.”
NAVA will conduct a national recruitment drive to find a new leader. And Winikoff wishes them all the best.
“I look forward to seeing where the energy and drive of NAVA will take it in the future,” she says. “There is always so much to do and I am sure my successor will enjoy great rewards and satisfaction in leading the organisation into the next exciting phase of its development.”
French-born/Belgium-based Laure Prouvost animates her first major Australian survey with her hallmark absurdism. ‘Oui Move In You’ is showing now at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore has won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the Venice Biennale for his monumental work, kith and kin. It marks the first time Australia has won the award in the event’s 130-year history.
Endlessly inventive, the work of Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-based artist Scotty So spans photography, painting, video work, and drag performance. With a dual exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, So talks about pageantry, begonias and queens.
CREATION is a new religion by artist Deborah Kelly, radically rethinking how we collectively come together. Having engaged with communities nation-wide, inviting audiences to dance, sing, listen and perform together, Kelly is now taking CREATION to regional Victoria. Curator Ineke Dane talks with Kelly about why she wanted to start a new religion, and where it will go in the future.
Julia Gutman works with textiles donated by family and friends, creating layered figurative tableaux. We stepped inside her studio in Lewisham in Sydney’s inner west, learning how connection is central to her practice.
With the perceived necessity of ‘performing the self’ greater than ever, comes questions of what we share or obscure—as James Barth’s art attests at the just-opened ‘18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum’ at Art Gallery of South Australia.
