Art Text/ Text Art: 45 years of visual story telling

Curated by our first curator James Kenney (Artbank curator 1980–1996).

As part of Artbank’s 45th birthday celebrations we invited James Kenney, our first curator (1980–1996) to revisit the collection that he was so foundational in shaping. Kenney chose to focus on the theme of Australian stories and in particular with artists that work in both image and text. Against the tenets of modernism, and through the rise of conceptual art, artists found a renewed interest in the combination of image and text in the 1980s and 1990s. Ranging from political slogans to memoir, from cartoon to data representation, the exhibition is rich with a diversity of approaches. Kenney revisits this moment through both historic pieces and more contemporary examples representing the legacy of these movements. Kenny is interested both in the calligraphic qualities of text as well as the more literary messages.

With: Abdulla, Davida Allen, Darcey Bella Arnold, Mitch Cairns, Scott Duncan, Fiona Hall, Chayni Henry, Nyurpaya Kaika, Heather Koowootha, Michael Lindeman, Alasdair McLuckie, Noel McKenna, Mary Pan, Tom Polo, Jörg Schmeisser, Justin Trendall, John Ullinger and Judy Watson.