Tag: University of Melbourne

Lecture | Kenneth Clark and Australian Art - Simon Pierse

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In this lecture Simon Pierse sheds new light on the role that Sir Kenneth Clark (later Baron Clark of Saltwood) played in bringing Australian art to a new audience in Britain during the early 1950s. Pierse examines the crucial part that Joseph Burke, inaugural Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, had in directing Clark’s attention towards the work of Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd and attempts to discover what may have lain beneath Clark’s abiding passion for Australian art and life. Simon Pierse is Senior Lecturer at Aberystwyth University and visiting fellow at the Australian Institute of Art History. His research focuses on British perceptions of Australian art, landscape and identity. His award winning book Australian Art and Artists in London, 1950-1965: an antipodean summer, was published by Ashgate in 2012. Date: Thursday 25th September, 6:30pm…

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News | New Endowed Chair in Australian Art History for the University of Melbourne

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Today the University of Melbourne announced a new fully endowed Chair in Art History at the University of Melbourne, to be named in honour of the Australia artist Hugh Ramsay. This, alongside the news that the university has also begun the process to recruit a new Herald Chair of Fine Arts, is great news for the Art History program at Melbourne, as well as for Art History in Australia more broadly. From the Head of the School of Culture and Communication, Professor Rachel Fensham: The Australian artist Hugh Ramsay (1877-1906) has been memorialized in a major gift to the University’s Art History Program.   Widely acknowledged as one of the most brilliant students ever trained in Victoria – and as an artist whose light shone very brightly at the beginning of the twentieth century – Ramsay was educated in Melbourne, but first made his mark in…

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Symposium | Kiffy Rubbo and The George Paton Gallery: Curating the 1970s

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A dynamic and unique force in Australian art, Kiffy Rubbo was director of the Ewing (later the George Paton) Gallery, at the University of Melbourne Student Union, 1971-1980. For the first time, her major role in Australian visual culture as well as her legacy are explored. Her curatorial strategies and the narratives she proposed about contemporary art are investigated together with the Gallery’s radical agenda. With Meredith Rogers, assistant director (1974-1979), Rubbo devised an innovative and inclusive program presenting a wide range of artforms. Under Rubbo’s leadership, the Gallery became a vital, nationally recognised venue, the first institutionally supported experimental art space. The symposium will begin with a keynote ‘Kiffy Rubbo, Women Curators and Australian Art Galleries’ by Frances Lindsay AM on Friday 29th August. This lecture will consider the achievements of Kiffy Rubbo and her legacy within the context…

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Floor Talk with Vincent Alessi and winner of the Basil Sellers Art Prize 2014

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Saturday Floor Talk | Basil Sellers Art Prize 2014 | Join Curator Vincent Alessi in conversation with the Basil Sellers Art Prize winner for 2014. Sixteen finalists have been selected for the fourth Basil Sellers Art Prize and are; Tony Albert, Narelle Autio, Zoe Croggon, Gabrielle de Vietri, Ivan Durrant, Shaun Gladwell, Richard Lewer, William Mackinnon, Rob McHaffie, Noel McKenna, Rob McLeish, Fiona McMonagle, Raquel Ormella, Khaled Sabsabi, Jenny Watson, and Gerry Wedd. The winner will be announced on 25 July 2014. Venue: Ian Potter Museum of Art, Swanston ST, Univeristy of Melbourne Parkville Date: Saturday 26 Jul 2014, 1.00- 2.00pm Free event | RSVP via this website.

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Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Deirdre Coleman

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Deirdre Coleman ‘Touissant Louverture in the Johnston House Museum’ The Haitian revolution was the only successful slave revolution in history, transforming the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the independent republic of Haiti. To what extent can we see the Johnston House Museum’s automaton clock and other ‘portraits’ of Toussaint L’Ouverture as part of the West’s disavowal of the Haitian revolution’s political goals of racial equality and racial liberation? Date: Monday 27 July, 6:30pm. Venue: Please note changed venue for this month’s seminar - Linkway room, 4th floor, John Medley Building (Building 191), University of Melbourne, Parkville (map). To follow the Melbourne Portrait Group visit their website.

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Nite Art Melbourne 2014

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Nite Art Melbourne is returning for its second year. On Wednesday 23rd July over 40 sites across Melbourne will open from 6pm until late. Galleries and Museums including the NGV, ACMI and the Ian Potter Museum of Art will be open alongside smaller galleries, artist-run spaces and temporary installations. The program is organised around precincts across the city: Melbourne University, Flinders Lane, Upper Bourke, Federation Square, North Melbourne, Spencer St, Guildford Lane and the Arts Centre. NiteArt has also collaborated with Open House Melbourne and several buildings from the 2014 program will be open for NiteArt with exhibitions at the J Substation, Grainger Museum, Royal Melbourne Hospital Tunnels, Kelvin Club and Athenaeum Library. As well as exhibitions there are walks, tours, talks, and workshops including: FUTURE NOW: What might the gallery space look like in the future? at Fed Square; Tours and Life Drawing at the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of…

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University of Melbourne Cultural Treasures Festival

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The Cultural Treasures Festival will be held at the University of Melbourne on 26–27 July. Visitors to the Cultural Treasures Festival will also be able to visit the University’s architectural heritage campus sites in the Melbourne Open House program, and view the antiquarian and rare books, prints and maps in the Rare Book Fair in Wilson Hall. The rich tradition of collecting at the University of Melbourne is  reflected in its diverse museums, scientific collections, archives, libraries and public art. Collections range from historic daisy specimens in the University Herbarium, collected by Sir Joseph Banks and Dr Daniel Solander on the first exploratory voyages to Australia in the early 1770s and a skeleton of the extinct New Zealand moa in the Tiegs Museum to Percy Grainger’s extraordinary collection of musical instruments and prints from the Renaissance and Baroque periods in…

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Lecture | Branden W. Joseph - Art and Dirt: Kim Gordon’s Aesthetics of Impurity

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Art and Dirt: Kim Gordon’s Aesthetics of Impurity Branden W. Joseph Before embarking on her path-breaking career as singer and bassist in the band Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon was a key artistic and critical voice in the New York art scene, close to such celebrated figures as Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, John Knight, Robert Longo and Laurie Anderson. Throughout the early 1980s in artist-run publications such as Real Life, ZG, Journal, and FILE, Gordon contributed a series of astute analyses of the artistic practices of these and other figures, as well as of the crossovers between art and music. At the same time, she was producing exhibitions and installations under the moniker “Design Office”. In this lecture, Branden W. Joseph, editor of Is It My Body?, a collection of Gordon’s early art writing published this year on Sternberg Press, will discuss the little known range of Gordon’s aesthetic practices and…

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Lecture | Fame and Beauty in Victorian Society: Portraits by George Frederic Watts | Barbara Bryant

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Fame and Beauty in Victorian Society: Portraits by George Frederic Watts Dr Barbara Bryant 2014 Ursula Hoff Lecture in partnership with the Ursula Hoff Institute In his own lifetime the reputation of English painter G.F. Watts (1817-1904) was international in its reach, thanks to exhibitions around the world from Europe to America. From 1879 onward Watts’s work was regularly seen in Australia, prompting major acquisitions for growing museum collections, with the earliest occurring in 1888 here in Melbourne with a portrait of the British Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, and a version of Love and Death. Although noted for his poetic and symbolic allegories, Watts was perhaps best known as a portrait painter. His self-conscious exploration of the genre of portraiture resulted in innovatory images which broaden the boundaries of conventional portrait making. This lecture will consider turning points in Watts’s…

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Public Lecture | Challenging time: Melbourne’s contribution to the conservation of visual culture at home and beyond | Newman College

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Challenging time: Melbourne’s contribution to the conservation of visual culture at home and beyond Robyn Sloggett, Nicole Tse and Susanna Collis Associate Professor Robyn Sloggett has been at the heart of the developments of teaching, research and conservation practice at the University of Melbourne for more than two decades. She presents here, together with specialist colleagues Dr Nicole Tse and Susanna Collis, some of the achievements, challenges and future directions offered by this exacting and exciting discipline. Date: Tuesday 3 June 2014, 5–6pm Venue: The Oratory, Newman College, University of Melbourne 887 Swanston Street, Parkville Bookings Online http://www.trybooking.com/83965 Contact: Email outreach@snac.unimelb.edu.au  | Telephone 9342 1614

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Symposium | Recent Research on Prints | University of Melbourne

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Research on prints: students give presentations on their recent research into aspects of print culture You are invited to attend a half-day symposium at the University of Melbourne, as part of the public program accompanying the current exhibition – Radicals, Slayers, Villains: Prints from the Baillieu Library. The symposium showcases recent research undertaken by postgraduate students in the School of Culture and Communication into prints and print culture. Date: Tuesday  27 May 2014, 9.00 am – 1.00 pm Venue: Leigh Scott Room, First Floor, Baillieu Library This event is free, but you are requested to register your attendance at: http://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/4061-research-on-prints-students-give-presentations-on-their-recent-research Program Louise Box (MA Art Curatorship) | Print production, profit and the market for woodcuts: Albrecht Dürer and the ‘marketing mix’ Kathleen Kiernan (PhD Art History) | Mapping the Landscape: The transition of the landscape aesthetic through prints from seventeenth-century Holland to eighteenth-century…

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Update | Program now available for Scottish Australia Symposium

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Scottish Australia Symposium | Art Gallery of Ballarat The Scottish Australia Symposium will take place from the 9-11 May in Ballarat. It will bring together a range of speakers on topics related to the exhibition and on the relationship between Scotland and Australia. Keynote Lecture ‘A country of enchantments’: Scottish Observations of Colonial Australia by Dr Lizanne Henderson, University of Glasgow is at 6:30pm, Friday 9th May 2014 at the University of Melbourne, Parkville - full details here. The full Symposium Program is now available here. Parallel sessions through both days, commencing at 9.30am and including an exhibition tour Symposium Venue: Arts Academy, Federation University Australia Ballarat Campus, Camp Street, Ballarat Dates: 9-11 May, 2014 All sessions of the Scottish-Australia Symposium, including the Keynote Address are free but registration is requested as space is limited. Register here Enquiries call 5320 5858 or artgal@ballarat.vic.gov.au   The Scottish Australia Symposium is presented by the Art…

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Public Lecture and Symposium | Scottish Australia | Art Gallery of Ballarat and University of Melbourne

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Public Lecture ‘A country of enchantments’: Scottish Observations of Colonial Australia Dr Lizanne Henderson, University of Glasgow This public lecture will focus on the observations, perceptions and representations of the natural world by Thomas Watling (1762-c.1814), the Scottish born artist and engraver who was transported to Botany Bay for forgery in 1792. This will be done by investigating the late eighteenth-century intellectual and artistic contexts surrounding Watling’s life and works and the ways in which these influences might have shaped his opinions of Australia. Taking a multi- and interdisciplinary perspective, the lecture will ask, and attempt to answer, whether or not Watling should be regarded as an artist or an illustrator? Though not always flattering in his written descriptions of his host nation Watling, like so many of his countrymen and women, was impressed by the sheer unusualness of the…

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Lecture | Infinite social landscape: Chinese contemporary art on the global stage - Professor Yiyang Shao

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Infinite social landscape: Chinese contemporary art on the global stage Professor Yiyang Shao China has been a land of radical changes in the past 30 years, from its economy to society, from its culture to individual life. Chinese contemporary art has become one of the most intensive and challenging parts of such a great change. Professor Yiyang Shao’s research aims to examine Chinese contemporary art in the past few decades, to explore the relationship between the work and its socio-political environment, and analyse how Chinese contemporary art engaged with its own society and shaped the cross-cultural nature of globalisation. During the major transformation of contemporary Chinese art, the artists occupied a pivotal position between past and present, local and global, modern and traditional means of expression. Yiyang Shao’s research includes case studies of some individual artists such as Ai Weiwei,…

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Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar Series | Ted Gott on Augustus John

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Next week, the Melbourne Portrait Group launches a series of seminars on various aspects of portraiture. The series opens with a paper from Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, and further seminars are scheduled over the coming months. Monday 24 March, 6:30pm Ted Gott, Portraits of Augustus John in the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1939 the Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, J. S. MacDonald, wrote forcefully about Augustus John’s life-size 1909 portrait of the Lord Mayor of Liverpool: ‘the painting is a bad one, and its purchase should not be entertained’. Nonetheless, the painting was subsequently purchased for the NGV by the Felton Bequests’ Committee. Why was opinion divided about the merit of John’s painting, and how did a work that would seem to be a natural fit for a…

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