Art Guide Australia is a print and online magazine exploring contemporary Australian art. Our editors and our team of writers and contributors know the local art scene and keep you informed through engaging and thoughtful articles. We speak with artists, curators and gallerists to learn more about their ideas and share them with an audience who want to know more about Australian art and what to see. We’re here to support a vibrant and diverse arts community and our aim is to provide independent, considered editorial coverage alongside a comprehensive picture of what’s happening in the visual arts across Australia.
Art Guide Australia • July/August 2023
A Note From the Editor
Issue 144 Contributors
Bendigo
Brisbane
Sydney
Canberra
Sydney
Albury
Townsville
Sydney
Albany
Hobart
The Journey Down • A 1975 Mazda ute is embarking on a 3,200-kilometre trek from Kununurra, in the Kimberley, to Perth’s WA Museum Boola Bardip. Painted by Warmun artists, and transformed into a sound sculpture, what’s the story behind this car?
Sharing Experience • An Ethiopian-Norwegian artist, Olana Janfa’s vivid, playful, and sometimes pointed paintings give a range of insights, from African diaspora to family love.
Vicki Couzens
Karen Black
Dancing into the Museum • Dance and choreography are experiencing a vital and widespread renaissance in contemporary art—but what’s the link and history between these two worlds, and how do they entwine in Australian arts today?
Her Own Revolution • The intimacy, suffering and art between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera is infamous. While the personal reverberates in their paintings, a new exhibition places their art not only alongside each other, but within a wider Mexican modernist movement.
All That Glitters • Across rhinestone-encrusted objects to multi-channel videos, Chantal Fraser’s (literally) dazzling art reimagines the workings of power.
Talking with Sancintya Mohini Simpson • Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a descendant of indentured labourers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa—and her art is entwined with this history. With work spanning multiple forms from painting to performance, Simpson speaks about her familial history, accessibility in art, and the nature of collaboration—and what she’s exhibiting for her solo show at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA).
The Power of Gathering • Amidst celebrating 40 Years of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs), Wardandi (Nyoongar) and Badimaya (Yamatji) senior curator and previous award judge, Clothilde Bullen, speaks to how these awards position First Nations art practice as contemporary art practice.
Comment Why do we fund the arts? • Forget cultural nationalism, we fund art for a life of communal beauty and dignity.
Sally Anderson Blue • Motherhood, domesticity, landscape, memory—these are just some of the experiences and memories Sally Anderson has captured in her two-decade painting practice, underpinned by a persistent blue.
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