From Richard Bell wearing an infamous t-shirt stating “White girls can’t hump” to the evolution of positioning First Nations art as contemporary art, Wardandi (Nyoongar) and Badimaya (Yamatji) senior curator, Clothilde Bullen, reflects on 40 years of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.
Charlie Flannigan was an Aboriginal stockman and jockey who was incarcerated at Fannie Bay Gaol, awaiting the gallows, in the late 1800s. Now, his rare and rediscovered drawings are showing at the South Australian Museum.
… that, despite receiving only a few entries of pretty average quality, you still didn’t win the life-changing $250,000 art prize.
Why is clay suddenly everywhere in galleries? Intimately entwined in our everyday lives, there are currently multiple clay-centered shows happening across the country—dealing with everything from feminism to form.
The Australian arts is so deflated that celebration ensued when the current Labor government merely recognised artmaking as worthwhile labour. Although we can now call art “work”, it doesn’t mean the battle for fair working conditions is over—as Madeleine Thornton-Smith explains.
Although Mia Boe only began painting full-time three years ago, her startling scenes of elongated figures in landscapes, politically motivated for speaking to colonial histories, are now exhibiting across the National Portrait Gallery to the National Gallery of Victoria.
From Spring1883 to Sydney Contemporary to Darwin Festival, we’ve rounded up an array of festivals and fairs across the rest of 2023—happening in almost every state and territory.
Interviews with artists offer invaluable insights—but exhibiting these is another story. Curator Julie Ewington talks through creating a show at the State Library of Queensland Gallery centred on recorded dialogues with artists from Anne Wallace to Vernon Ah Kee to Fiona Foley.
Since the 1990s, American photographer Catherine Opie has been internationally renowned for capturing friends and family, queer domestic life, and defining political moments. Entwining identity and sexuality, kinship and community, Opie’s first Australian survey is at Heide Museum of Modern Art.
Perhaps it’s related to contemporary life, but the spiritual in art feels central at this moment. Now, as part of RISING Festival, the spiritual practices and connections of First Nations artists are taking over a historic Melbourne site.
Victoria’s flagship festival of music, food, art and culture is back, starting 7 June. With 185 events, here’s our recommendations of what to see—from Cate Blanchett as a tiger in a supermarket to First Nations artists connection to the spirit world.
Before Philippa Cullen’s untimely death, the artist, who was prominent in the early 1970s, envisioned “a new medium in which dance is inseparable with technology, music and lighting”. Fifty years later, her work is at McClelland Sculpture Park+ Gallery.
