Published 24 January 2022
Published 15 December 2021
The Zandra Rhodes costume in Sydney's Powerhouse Museum holds unique significance within the design collection.
Museum exhibitions tend not to challenge visitors with critical perspectives, contradictory points of view or subject matter which is controversial. I would like to explore different ways that conflict might be included in exhibitions and used to further our understanding of the past.
Published March 1992
Museums are complex social phenomena and valuable resources. There's an ecological analogy there; if you mess with even apparently trivial elements of a complex system, the results can be unpredictable, powerful and are most often catastrophic.
Selected list of museums and art galleries around Australia.
Guest editor for Vol 12 No 1 Museums on the Edge. This edition was founded on a perception of a lack of any quantity of readily available material on the Australian and New Zealand experience of museums.
Exhibition review An Interrupted Dialogue. One of the first international experimental art exhibitions to be shown outside Hungary since the end of World War 2. Grayson worked with Suzy Meszoly of the Soros Fine Art Documentation Centre of Budapest in 1988 during the time when changes were sweeping through Central Europe.
Helen Andreoni writes on matters which are addressed in the report commissioned by the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) by Amareswar Galla (also in this edition of Artlink).
In 1975 the Whitlam Government's Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections (the Piggott Committee, after its chairman P H Piggott) unsuccessfully recommended setting up of a Museum's Commission.
Jim Specht of the Australian Museum Sydney, has written that "public and private collections of archaeological and ethnographic specimens around the world contain tens of millions of specimens yet only a minute fraction of this total is actually held in its countries of origin" ; most of this material he says, was acquired through colonial or military occupation.
Interview with Louise Dauth about issues of gender. Dale Spender is a foundation member of the Women Heritage and Museums Group.
One of the things which continues to fascinate me about museums is how, despite the vast amount of talk about displaying material culture, the often personal, often idiosyncratic, often haphazard decisions about departments are very rarely mentioned. Yet these decisions are central to much of the museum's collection, display, exhibitions and research programme.
One of the curious things about very large cities is the gulf that exists between the inner city and the outer suburbs or hinterland.
Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art. Exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney from 31st March 1992. Article by the co-curator Robert Leonard.
