Tag: News

The new Buxton Contemporary at the University of Melbourne’s College of the Arts will open on the 9th March, with the opening celebrations designed to coincide with the beginning of the 2018 university academic year. The inaugural exhibition, The Shape of Things to Come has been curated by Melissa Keys. It will feature works by more than 20 artists from the Buxton collection, and explores the various roles and agencies of the artist through culture, society and politics—as visionaries, storytellers, dissenters and alchemists. Included will be major works by Ricky Swallow, Emily Floyd, Hany Armanious and Mikala Dwyer among many others. Future programming will use the Michael Buxton Collection as a springboard to captivate and educate audiences on trends in contemporary art and connect current Australian contemporary practice to international developments. The University of Melbourne has announced that Ryan Johnston…

Read more →

News from NETS Victoria Board of Management announcing the appointment of Adam Harding to the position of Chair. Adam Harding has been the Director of Horsham Regional Art Gallery (HRAG) since 2009 and oversaw their recent redevelopment.  He has continued Horsham’s commitment to community engagement while reinterpreting the Gallery’s collection to focus on their three main areas of collecting; artworks and images of Horsham and the Wimmera, the Mack Jost Collection of Australian Art, and its nationally significant collection of Australian photography.  Harding has been focusing on investigating modes of exhibition development and presentation that places HRAG and the Wimmera as a site of production and collaboration. “Hosting a NETS Victoria touring exhibition has always been a highlight for me, even back in the day when I was a curatorial assistant in Warrnambool, having the NETS Victoria install team on…

Read more →

Two senior figures of the Australian gallery world received top honours in the recent 2017 Queen’s Birthday announcements. Judith Ryan, Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the visual arts, particularly to the museums and galleries sector, as a curator of Indigenous exhibitions, and as an author. Dr Anna Gray, former head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant services to the visual arts, as a curator, scholar and historian, to Australian artists and to the promotion of cultural heritage.

Read more →

ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) has announced that the recipient of the inaugural $80,000 Mordant Family VR Commission is Dr Christian Thompson, one of Australia’s leading visual artists. The commission, created in partnership with Catriona and Simon Mordant AM, the City of Melbourne and ACMI, builds on ACMI’s existing commissioning initiatives, and heralds a new era of artist support at ACMI for emerging platforms. The Mordant Family VR Commission will allow Thompsons’ practice to extend into the exciting medium of VR for the first time. Thompson is a contemporary artist whose work explores notions of identity, cultural hybridity, and history; often referring to the relationships between these concepts and the environment. Formally trained as a sculptor, Thompson’s multidisciplinary practice engages mediums such as photography, video, sculpture, performance, and sound. His work focuses on the exploration of identity, sexuality,…

Read more →

News from the University of Melbourne that art historian Professor Jennifer Milam has been appointed as the new Head of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She will take up the position from 1 January 2018. Jennifer is currently an ARC Future Fellow and Professor of Art History and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sydney. She has published articles on art, gardens and aesthetic ideas during the Enlightenment in journals such as The Art Bulletin, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Art History, Burlington Magazine, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Her books include studies of Rococo art and architecture, the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and a co-edited volume on women artists and patrons in eighteenth-century Europe. Her previous roles at the University of Sydney include Chair of Department of Art History and…

Read more →