The awards are held as part of the Australia Day Celebrations for 2021, organised by Shoalhaven City Council in conjunction with the Australia Day Council NSW.

The Awards aim to recognise outstanding contributions to the local community during 2020.

CategoriesThere are five categories, including:

• Young Citizen Award - 24 years and younger
• Citizen Award - 25 years and older
• Outstanding Contribution to an Inclusive Shoalhaven - All ages. This category acknowledges nominees who have made an outstanding contribution to making the Shoalhaven a more inclusive community for people of all abilities, ages and/or culture.
• Outstanding Contribution towards Innovating Arts & Culture - Open to both artists and non-artists contributing to the arts in any capacity
• Outstanding Contribution to the Environment - This award is open to all ages and highlights nominees who have made an outstanding contribution to the environment within the Shoalhaven.
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NominationNominations close at 5.00pm on Friday 30 November 2020.

The Awards PresentationThe Awards will be presented by Mayor Amanda Findley at the Shoalhaven Australia Day Awards 2021 Presentation Ceremony which will be held on 26 January 2021.

Namatjira’s win marks a milestone in the Archibald. As the artist said via video link, “I am proud to be the first Indigenous winner of the Archibald Prize. It only took 99 years.”

Since its inception in 1921, the Archibald Prize has been held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). For nearly 100 years, being selected by the AGNSW board of trustees as a finalist in the Archibald has been a goal for many Australian painters. Not so much for the prize money – although, with the current cash prize being $100,000, this can provide motivation – but for the spotlight it can shine on an artist’s career.

This year, Vincent Namatjira was chosen from a field of 55 finalists, narrowed down from 1068 entires.

In his artist’s statement Namatjira explains why he decided to paint Adam Goodes. “I first met Adam in 2018, when he visited the school in Indulkana where I live, as part of his work promoting Indigenous literacy. When I saw the documentary The Final Quarter about Adam’s final season of AFL, my guts were churning as I relived Adam’s experiences of relentless racism on and off the field,” the artist explains. “Memories of my own experiences were stirred up and I wanted to reach out and reconnect with Adam.”

Earlier in the week, Steve Dow spoke to finalists Craig Ruddy, Angus McDonald and Wendy Sharpe to get the stories behind their portraits.

Winners of the Wynne and Sulman Prizes were also announced today.

The $50,000 Wynne Prize for a landscape painting of Australian scenery or a figurative sculpture was awarded to Hubert Pareroultja for his landscape painting, Tjoritja (West MacDonnell Ranges, NT).

The $40,000 Sulman Prize for subject painting, genre painting or mural project in oil, acrylic, watercolour or mixed media was awarded to Marikit Santiago for her painting, The divine.

AGNSW director Michael Brand said there are 107 artworks to visit across the three prizes. “There is lots to see this year – great works of art – in a year when artists, like so many others, have been doing it tough.”

The 2020 Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes open to the public on 26 September.

Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes
Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW)
26 September  – 10 January 2021

(Source:artguide.com.au)

Euan Macleod and well known New Zealand photographer Craig Potton spent a few nights together near the top of the Tasman Glacier early in 2020.

In the uncontained Australian fire season of summer 2019-20, not only was the sky above much of Aotearoa/New Zealand stained a reddish brown by smoke, dust and ash, there were reports of ‘caramelised’ snow on Franz Josef Glacier and elsewhere in the Southern Alps.

Media photographs featured helicopters flying through dense smoke and landing on beige-coloured alpine snow and ice.

Sculptor Harrie Fasher was born in Sydney, in 1977.  Her work, embodies tension and movement, is reknown for its distinct raw language. Fasher utilises both abstraction and figurative form, predominately the horse and more recently the human figure, to convey her message. The sculptures are three-dimensional drawings that elicit an emotional response from the viewer.

Her sculptures display an innate knowledge of the physical and gestural nuances of the horse, and the unique bond between horse and human.

Fasher’s work can be found in numerous collections both in Australia and internationally, including the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, National Art School, Sydney Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW and Orange Regional Art Gallery, NSW. She currently lives and works in Portland, NSW. King Street looks forward to the commencement of her 2020 solo exhibition, Cadence.

Elisabeth Cummings is one of Australia’s most respected living artists with a career spanning over 60 years. Cummings studied at the National Art School in Sydney and was awarded the AGNSW Travelling Art Scholarship in 1958.

Cummings’ bold use of colour and exaggerated mark-making is her signature approach to the Australian landscape. An intrepid traveller, Elisabeth continues her journeys around the Australian bush, painting smaller ‘en plein air’ works, as well as larger pieces back in the studio. She frequently returns to Wedderburn, where Elisabeth finds unending subject matter in the interior of her studio and the surrounds she knows so well.

Together In Art is a new online project from the Art Gallery of New South Wales that connects people through art in difficult times.

At a deeply challenging time for the arts in Australia, Together In Art is working with artists, performers, educators and our community partners to create meaningful art encounters that offer daily inspiration.

From Gadigal land, to your home wherever it may be, they'll be bringing you new commissions, pocket exhibitions, behind-the-scenes tours, soul-stirring performances, art classes with some of Australia’s great artists, deep dives into the riches of our collection, and much more.

Head on over and check it out!

Scroll for some images from the page....

Arts projects, on the theme A Sense of Place, will support applications of up to $10,000 for art forms such as photography, music, dance, new art forms, performance and literature. It also supports applications for public art that improves engagement with the arts and enhances the urban environments of the Shoalhaven.

The Arts Practitioners’ Professional Development Grants, of up to $3,000, focuses on supporting individual artists, arts workers and small groups to enhance their skills and build sustainable careers. Eligible activities include, mentorships, residencies, research trips, masterclasses, and creative developments.

The grants are open until Friday 8 May 2020.

This Easter is the perfect opportunity for our community creatives to take some time to apply for these grants.  

Whatever your interest or obsession, there is likely to be a podcast for it. Flourishing since the mid-2000s, podcasting is a regular staple in many media diets. One in three Australians tuned-in to a podcast in the last month and regular listeners consume around six hours of podcasts per week.

With such an engaged audience, and the ease with which anyone can start a podcast and engineer a listening experience, this new cultural form is growing in abundance — there are now, Vulture reports, over 660,000 podcasts in circulation, generating 28 million individual episodes. With such staggering numbers, finding the podcasts that resonate with your tastes and curiosities can be difficult. And if your interest is arts and culture, finding the right arts podcast can feel like wandering an endless room — or a long scroll through your iTunes app. As the host and producer of Art Guide Australia’s podcast, I’m regularly sifting through arts podcasts and have crafted a selection from those currently capturing my attention.

A World of One’s Own is clearly a reference to writer Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own. This interview podcast centres on understanding the thoughts and artistic practices of women and gender non-binary artists from a variety of backgrounds. Hosted by artist Tai Snaith, A World of One’s Own initially grew out of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s lauded feminist exhibition Unfinished Business, and soon became a compelling podcast in its own right. Intelligent, relaxed and humorous, Snaith talks to one artist per episode, asking questions across personal, aesthetic and political spheres.

Featuring interviews with artists including Patricia Piccinini, Sally Smart, Megan Cope and Lucreccia Quintanilla (this last is a favourite episode), the podcast is a timely series speaking on topics as diverse as parenthood, artistic risk, experimentation, activism, vulnerability and aspiration. With season two having just wrapped up and season three a possibility, the show has also been artistically generative, influencing Snaith to create her own new work in relation to the conversations.

In the early years, podcasting was stigmatised as simply amateur radio. Now radio hosts and producers are beginning to ensure their programs can also be ‘podcastable’. In Australia, ABC Radio National has been leading this change, creating podcasts based on their regular shows, including The Art Show. Reliably informative and always timely, The Art Show is hosted by Ed Ayres and appears in podcast form almost immediately after the show has aired on radio. Featuring interviews and radio features, The Art Show may not be as intimate or themed as other podcasts, nor revolutionary in its model, but it’s a guaranteed weekly release with well-reported, country-wide content delivered with charm.

Although FIELD WORK only had a short run of eight episodes, they were eight important and interesting episodes. Co-produced by Melbourne artist-run-initiative Bus Projects and Triple R’s Bec Fary, the show was hosted by artist and academic Drew Pettifer who brought together one artist and one expert for each episode, generating a three-way conversation. Every show was grounded by a certain theme that was mined for both its artistic and societal implications. These included environmental activism, bioethics, queer rights and representation, fashion and identity, intersectional feminism, Indigenous trauma, otherness and activism. It’s a smart format in which the pairing of artist and expert gives the art context, while also implicitly illustrating the ways in which societal and political concerns are worked through aesthetically. While I’d rate all of the episodes, a personal favourite is the environment-centred show pairing artist Raquel Ormella and Greens Member of Parliament Adam Bandt.

Propelled by the personality and humour of host Tamar Avishai, The Lonely Palette is an American podcast that has one simple premise: each episode is devoted to discussing one artwork, avoiding the mundanity or pretentiousness that can characterise some art reflections. As Avishai says at the beginning of every episode, The Lonely Palette “is the podcast that returns art history to the masses one painting at a time.”

With a new episode released roughly every four weeks, each show begins with an audio montage of ‘everyday’ museum and gallery visitors explaining what they see, and their opinion of what they see. This immediately overcomes a central problem that podcasts discussing artworks may have: listeners can’t see the artwork. After these anonymous descriptions Avishai picks up the conversation, mixing intelligent reflection with the historical, cultural and aesthetic particulars of each artist and painting being unpacked. While the show does tend to focus on white, male masters such as Marcel Duchamp, Rembrandt, and René Magritte, it will be interesting to see if moving forward Avishai gives greater air time to more historically marginalised artists.

True to its name, The Art Newspaper is centred on art news. For Australian listeners, it gives perspective and insight into the art world at a more global (particularly American) level, with episodes not only containing interviews with artists and features on exhibitions, but explorations into the art market, the processes of collectors and dealers, and the economics and politics of art fairs and events. In essence, you get information on how both artists and the art world work, and on the big events of the moment. Released weekly, each episode features multiple guests and voices, with an hour-long focus on one or two main questions or exhibitions, delivered in a reportage style.

And you can find Art Guide Australia podcasts on Soundcloud, or you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. And keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming four-part Curator Series, in which we speak with four different curators to unpack the processes, intricacies and particulars of contemporary curating.

(Source:  artguide.com.au)

In June 2017, five renowned Australian artists travelled to a remote location in Kakadu in the Northern Territory to participate in a week long artist’s camp. It is the same site where recently found artefacts show that Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for 18,000 years longer than previously estimated.

Mike Mitchell, Director of Mitchell Fine Art, organised the trip to inspire the artists with some of the most exquisite landscape that Australia has to offer, while providing them the opportunity to engage with the Aboriginal traditional owners.

Participating artists include Steve Lopes, Franck Gohier, Euan Macleod, Peter Hudson and Christine Christophersen.

Travelling to Western Arnhem land the group spent time with traditional owners and their families exploring the country, visiting rarely seen rock art and scenery and learning about the area and the immense significance of country for the local Aboriginal people.

What followed was a week of plein air painting (French for painting outdoors) in and around Arnhem Land. It resulted in a body of work that is an immediate reaction to the landscape, inspired by the experiences and observations of the world’s oldest culture in a place unchanged over thousands of years.

The group witnessed snippets of a lifestyle and culture that goes beyond recorded memory. Aboriginal rock art depicting Thylacines (Tasmanian Tigers), ceremony and the mail plane from the 1930’s shows a pictorial history of the area. This all had a profound effect of this group of artists and is reflected in the artworks produced.

Both Peter and Euan joined us last year on our East MacDonnell Ranges Art Workshop!  What a wonderful treat for all of us to watch and learn from these esteemed artists as they painted the landscape along with us!

Plunge in, Kalorama 2019 is a sensuous response to the memory of swimming while Madre, Kalorama 2008 is the embracing form of a single monumental tree. Ramble, Kalorama 2017-19 is an immersive wall painting that is the culmination of ten years of working around the problem of how to convey the somewhat episodic nature of looking, the manner in which the nature of the spaces experienced unfolds over time.

All three images were created en plein air in the bush.