The NGA was vested with a special responsibility to share its collection with the nation, and since its opening hundreds of generally medium-sized exhibitions drawn from the collections have traveled around Australia, often displayed in small regional towns. By the end of 2018, 11 million Australians living in regional, and often remote, areas had participated in the program.
Since the early 1990s, the NGA has displayed dozens of major blockbuster exhibitions drawn from around the world. Conversely, it is increasingly lending exhibitions of contemporary Australian art, particularly the Indigenous schools to overseas venues, as part of the government’s informal program of cultural diplomacy. With strong government financial support for acquisitions, and many private donors nationwide, the NGA has built up the largest fine art collection in Australia with rich holdings of global distinction in painting and sculpture, prints and drawings, design and decorative arts, photography and the moving image. In the 1970s, under the guidance of its inaugural director James Mollison, the New York School became a special focus with exceptional collections built up representing all its key participants, and subsequent movements, from Pop to Minimalism and beyond, making it one of the finest anywhere outside the USA itself. The 1973 acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s masterpiece Blue poles 1952, for the highest price ever paid for an American work of art, ensured global attention. The collection of mid-late twentieth century American prints, generously supported by American master printer Ken Tyler, is close to definitive.
A new wing, completed in 2010, provided a suite of large galleries dedicated to displaying the contemporary Indigenous art movement, from the first central desert paintings of the early 1970s to now, and the NGA holds the largest and deepest collection anywhere. Its educational outreach is significant and national, and it has become a key destination for school groups from around the country visiting the national capital. The 2010 wing might be considered de facto as the national collection of contemporary indigenous art, and the National Museum of Australia, (opened 2001) also has distinguished collections, though with different emphases; the NMA shares its lakeside site with the National Centre for Indigenous Studies.
Over the years, proposals for a separate national museum of indigenous visual culture have been suggested for Canberra, but have never gained ground, given the large costs involved, and the current generous provision. It has been noted above that similar proposals are being floated (in 2018) for a national Indigenous art center in both Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, and in Adelaide in South Australia.
The NGA has conceptual plans, awaiting federal government approval and financial support, for a new wing, which will provide double the existing spaces for the collections, dedicated not only to Australian art, but also with a significant provision for global contemporary practice.
A National Portrait Gallery (NPG) for Australia was established in 1998, originally occupying space in the vacated first Parliament House, following the construction and opening in 1988 of the permanent Parliament House, designed in a classicizing post-modern style. One of only four national portrait galleries in the world, the concept and plan were particularly driven by the collectors and philanthropists Gordon and Marilyn Darling, and a new permanent building was opened in 2008, adjacent to the NGA and the High Court. It has quickly gained enthusiastic recognition as the national repository of portraits of prominent Australians, and tells national stories around the portraits, and its active and innovative program of commissions in different media, with innovative installations and exhibitions, have ensured a high reputation.
As in London and Washington DC, all of Australia’s national, government-funded cultural organizations offer free entry to the permanent collections, and this currently applies to the state institutions as well, though in the past, under political pressure, some have been obliged to apply an entry charge. In Melbourne, for example, the NGV has free general admission, while the state-funded Museum of Victoria applies a fee. All museums and galleries in Australia impose entry fees on their major exhibitions, first and foremost to recoup the usually substantial costs.
The Contemporary Indigenous Art Movement, and Its Introduction to Public Art Museums
One of the most significant museological developments of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been the response to the rise of a globally relevant and recognized contemporary Indigenous art movement. The process of Indigenous visual culture leaping the fence dividing museums of ethnography, natural history and science from fine art museums has an early history, with the AGNSW, closely followed by the NGV, leading the way in the mid twentieth century, collecting and exhibiting customary objects with ritual meaning such as Tiwi and Arnhem Land funerary poles,27 and including paintings on bark.
A number of early-mid twentieth century exhibitions in Australian art museums sought to demonstrate the inherent aesthetic value of such works, but no-one had predicted that the process begun at Papunya Tula in the central desert from 1971 – when a local teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, encouraged adult indigenous men to make visual representations of their country and myths on boards, and soon canvas, using non-traditional paint materials such as acrylic – would blossom into the single most important development in Australian art practice, and Australian visual culture generally, since the period of Federation. It is hardly a coincidence that this process developed in parallel with the early phase of a considered national program to deliver to indigenous people appropriate legal and civic status, and in due course land rights. Whatever indigenous and non-indigenous Australians may feel about the success or otherwise of a whole raft of government policy initiatives aimed at improving indigenous access to fundamental rights and opportunities, it cannot be denied that awareness of, and deep pride in, the trajectory of contemporary indigenous visual culture is shared by all Australians, and binds us together.
Exhibitions of indigenous art have proliferated, touring not only around Australia but, increasingly, internationally.28 At the time of writing (July 2018) a major indigenous exhibition drawn from the collections of the NGA in Canberra, had just concluded in Berlin, where it drew large crowds, and subsequently opened in New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Australian indigenous art has always been included in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia-Pacific Triennial, and the National Gallery in Canberra has an established Triennial exhibition of contemporary indigenous art, the most recent being the third in the series, Defying Empire, to which 30 invited indigenous artists contributed work which addressed issues of colonization and confrontation between indigenous communities and settlers, on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum which at last gave indigenous Australians legal recognition under the constitution. All visitors to the NGA enter the building passing the Aboriginal Memorial, an installation created by nine groups of indigenous artists in 1988, at the time of the 1988 Bicentenary events, celebrating (from a non-indigenous perspective) 200 years of British settlement and national progress. Each of the 200 poles, carved and painted to reflect the style of the hollow log coffins of Central Arnhem Land, commemorates one year of post-settlement conflict and indigenous suffering and loss.
Each of the state galleries has its own history of engagement with indigenous visual culture, and how and when indigenous art was first collected and exhibited. It took a decade for the first serious art museum responses to the new movement. The still relatively small Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in Darwin was effectively, and appropriately, the first to collect and exhibit contemporary indigenous art, especially from Papunya Tula from its establishment in 1971. In 1981, the NGA director James Mollison decided that the national collection must begin to acquire this art, appointing a full-time curator in 1983. In the same year, the AGNSW began a considered collecting program, followed by the NGV in 1984. In 1989 the nascent MCA in Sydney developed a curatorial policy which gave special priority to indigenous contemporary art, and the other major state galleries followed suit. At first, it often proved difficult to identify suitable spaces for these new, growing collections, and in some institutions such as the NGV they were constantly on the move, but during the 1990s most public art museums provided permanent spaces, though rarely of suitable size.
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