Social Conscience, Migration, Rivers and Oceans: Virginia King
New Zealand sculptor Virginia King is an artist who has long recognised the changing nature of public art and the part it can play in raising awareness and social conscience.
Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s recent work 'Queen and Country' (2003-2010) overwhelmingly embodies the complexities and possibilities for memorial-making and public art today.
Kate Warren examines Melbourne's laneways and the many way artists have used them to re-energise and re-familiarise local audiences with their urban environment. Artists mentioned are Sarah Rodigari and Tim Webster, Troy Innocent, Matt Blackwood, John Alexander Borley, Anthony McInneny, Sue McCauley and Keith Deverell, and QingLan Huang.
The Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park (GASP!) project on the outskirts of Hobart is under construction just two kilometres from Australia’s largest private freely accessible art gallery the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), opening in January 2011.
The notion of public art has been shifting over the years to include hopeful new models for change in a time of uncertainty - festivals, the temporal, the long term developmental and experimental thinking about how art can modify and influence the public realm.
Janet Maughan travelled to the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in September 2009. With Stephanie Britton she interviewed the indefatigable Fram Kitagawa, Director of both the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial [ETAT] and of the new Niigata Water and Land Art Festival in the seaport of Niigata, and wove his words around the experience of seeing outstanding art in the unusual and delightful surroundings of the Japanese countryside.