Is the National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition of Tom Roberts’ really ‘for all Australians’? A recent national survey finds a racial divide in Australian art appreciation.
Artist Mike Parr’s career might be best described as a series of alarming acts - he’s cut his legs with a scalpel and used his blood as paint. His latest act is erase his work by painting it white.
Islamic art in Australia is inaccessible and largely overlooked. It is rarely taught as a dedicated subject in Australian universities, and almost never seen beyond state capitals. Why?
It hovers uneasily between being a fine-art exhibition showing the diversity and sheer visual and sociocultural potency of contemporary Australian visual art practice, and an older-style ethnographic survey.
The latest exhibition of photographer Ian North’s work, Antarctica 1915, demonstrates his uncanny ability to tap into the zeitgeist of our socially fractured and culturally fragmented times.
Indigenous artist Dennis Nona is currently serving a jail term for serious crimes. Should the work of the most significant artist to have emerged from the Torres Strait in the last 50 years be removed from gallery walls?
Betty Churcher, the first and only female director of the National Gallery of Australia, has died. Throughout her extraordinary career as an arts administrator, the art always came first.
A major photography retrospective opened at the Art Gallery of NSW on the weekend, but what does The Photograph and Australia tell us about our present and past?
Some 23 years after his death, Australian artist Brett Whitely’s vision continues to have resonance and will likely remain a defining representation of late 20th century Australia.
What is the future of Australia’s wealthiest state? The Conversation, in conjunction with Griffith REVIEW and Curtin University, is publishing a series of articles exploring the unique issues facing Western…
There are about 30,000 professional practicing visual artists in Australia today (see note). By professional, I mean exhibiting regularly in recognised commercial or public galleries and represented in…
In Australia’s somewhat subdued public sculpture scene, the McClelland Sculpture Survey – which runs until July 19, 2015 – provides a rare opportunity for witnessing contemporary public sculpture. This…
For over a thousand generations Aboriginal people made no distinction between art and craft. Art was, and still is, a way of life and as much about function as it is about beauty and form. Artistic forms…
This is an edited extract from Ted Snell’s book, Stan Hopewell: Facing the Stars. This is a love story! It is the story of Stan Hopewell and his beloved wife Joyce, a couple whose lives intertwined during…
The recent television series The Art of Australia presented by Edmund Capon, and its counterpart Hannah Gadsby’s OZ, offered a blinkered view of Australian art practice that ended at the 129th meridian…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Art and Culture, Head of the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, University of Melbourne, The University of Melbourne