Institutional Radicals: Co-Examining Curatorial Visions and Art Histories in Australia

The formal histories of Australian art and design have most commonly been discussed through books, journal articles and, to a lesser extent, conference papers. However a close examination of the field reveals that those art historians who have most effectively changed perceptions of Australia's visual and material history, expanded their vision by curating exhibitions. This process has been most obvious since the early 1970s when the significant cultural changes of the first year of the Whitlam Labor government led to a flowering of curatorial expertise. The cultural turn that included significant new funding for the arts and a quickening of demands for Aboriginal land rights, are taken as the starting point for examining different trends in Australian exhibition practice, including the importance of regional curators working outside the major state and national art museums, the recognition of Aboriginal art as contemporary practice, and refreshingly different historical surveys. This paper examines the idea that shifting cultural mores were addressed in curatorial visions rather than in academic art history, and that a refinement of these early curatorial insights has driven Australian art scholarship for more than a generation.