AGNSW_AnnRep_00 full.pdf - Parliament of New South Wales ...

students were booked out during the Michelangelo to
Matisse exhibition.
Regular programmes including courses on art
appreciation and art history – supported by the Art
Gallery’s research library and archive – attracted committed
audiences. Amongst the popular workshops, forums, tours,
free public talks and weekly film screenings, artist talks
and dialogues were held in conjunction with the Biennale
of Sydney and the Sydney Festival, adding a lively and
informative dimension to the display of works of art.
The popularity of the free 15-minute introductory
slide talks for special exhibitions grew. The audio-visual
section of the department has begun making in-house
videos. Informative video displays in exhibitions areas
have been another feature of the expanded media-related
education activities.
Free performances related to temporary exhibitions
and the permanent collection consistently attracted large
audiences. Many programmes with a family focus took
place over weekends and during holidays.
Young audiences are a particular focus. This year the
department trained another 40 volunteer children’s guides
and eight teacher-lecturers. This resulted in 75 children’s
guides taking 21,363 children on art adventure tours,
while 16 teacher-lecturers took 6,441 students on
discussion tours. In-depth education services for
temporary exhibitions, conducted by full time museum
educators, attracted 5,807 students. Over the year, 56,118
students made self-guided visits.
Artexpress, the annual exhibition featuring a
selection of outstanding works created for the HSC
examination in visual arts, was again extremely popular
with schools and the general public. It was attended by
17,762 students in booked groups alone.
Revelant educational resources, including education
kits, education posters and the quarterly Exhibition and
Events brochure, were produced for the permanent
collection and temporary exhibitions.
Important community initiatives continued with the
steady growth in attendances at free Auslan-interpreted
tours for both deaf and hearing people. In September
1999, in association with the Australian Museum, the Art
Gallery organised a professional development lecture by
William Kirby, a world renowned expert on services in
museums for blind and visually impaired people.
In May 2000 the Art Gallery was notified of a
$300,000 grant from the Ian Potter Foundation for an
audience development programme, targeting young people
and Asian audiences.
18
REGIONAL CONTACT
Chief touring exhibition for the year was drawn
from the Archibald Prize, going to Moree, Newcastle,
Griffith, Melbourne and Albury. The Jeffrey Smart
retrospective went to Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne.
Seeing Cézanne was seen in Ballarat and Modern Lovers -
Bettina Rheims in Melbourne. These exhibitions attracted
a total of 155,767 visitors.
Regional touring is only one of many ways in which
the Art Gallery makes its presence felt outside Sydney.
This year works were lent to other institutions for
exhibitions around Australia, with particular assistance
given to Moree Plains Regional Art Gallery for their
exhibition of the work of Brett Whiteley.
At a one-day conference for NSW Regional
Galleries, librarians Kay Truelove and Robyn Louey from
the Art Gallery’s research library and archive presented a
much appreciated workshop on the use of the Internet as
a research tool for the visual arts.
Further a field, Sydney Long’s Pan 1898 was loaned
to the Royal Academy, London, for the exhibition 1900:
Art at the Crossroads. This exhibition later moved to the
Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Curator and Assistant Curator of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Art represented the Art Gallery at
the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Art Award in Darwin in September 1999. The Assistant
Curator of Aboriginal Art also attended the National
Indigenous Artists Conference in Cairns and the Nji Jaga
Anya Nji, New South Wales Aboriginal Artists
Conference in Armidale.
The Art Gallery’s website - upgraded and relaunched
in June 2000 - has become an increasingly important
communications and marketing tool, providing regular
updates on activities and attracting high levels of repeat
visits to the site from web users in Australia and around
the world. In the new financial year, the website is
expected to include information from the computerised
collection management system which was developed by
the registration department and handed over this year to
curatorial departments to prepare for its website appearance.
The Art Gallery website will also benefit from NSW
Government funding to digitise the collection over the next
three years commencing in July, 2000. This will allow
images of most of the collection to be added to the Art
Gallery database for research and internal use, eventually
making these available to the public via the website.