Daniel Mudie Cunningham: Proud Mary

12 Feb 2024 - 14 Apr 2024

Daniel Mudie Cunningham: Proud Mary is a 4-channel video projection that documents Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s performances of this iconic song.  Chosen as his funeral song, Daniel has vowed to perform a lip-syncing rendition of the song every five years until his death. 

Since the original performance in 2007, the routine has been enacted three times – in an abandoned car park in 2012 and then in 2017 in an empty Tasmanian swimming pool. The most recent performance, in a Port Kembla field of concrete tetrahedrons in 2022, will have its first Sydney showing at MAG&M.

In his 2007 artwork, Funeral Songs, the artist asked his friends to name the songs they would each like to have played at their funerals. The selected songs ran the gamut from playful to sombre, together representing an archive of how people wish to be remembered at their last hurrah. Daniel’s choice, Tina Turner’s rendition of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Proud Mary, is a nod to the impact Turner’s 1991 and 1993 performances in Sydney had on the artist.

This show was part of the official 2024 Mardi Gras program. 

 

Bleeding Hearts & Morning Glory: Artwork by Guy Fredericks & Chloe Watfern with Studio A

1 Mar - 14 Apr

A collaborative project developed by artist Guy Fredericks, Studio A, Dr Chloe Watfern, and MAG&M, Bleeding Hearts and Morning Glory is a socially engaged exhibition that encourages people with intellectual disabilities to participate in conversations about climate change. The project engages neurodivergent people across the Northern Beaches involved in climate action, caring for country, tending local gardens, and working with community groups focused on climate solutions.

During the initial phase of the project, Guy and Chloe are collaborating with a local organisation, Bushlink, to conduct a series of artmaking workshops in which climate concerns will be discussed and addressed through making art objects. These workshops will form the basis of Guy’s art-making process – culminating in the exhibition at MAG&M.

Studio A is a studio for professional artists with intellectual disability. The organisation aims to assist artists with intellectual disability to overcome the barriers that prevent them from accessing the conventional education and professional development pathways that are needed to be successful and renowned visual artists.

 

Out Front 2024: Thirty years of Express Yourself

1 Mar - Sun 14

2024 marks the 30th iteration of our Express Yourself exhibition, the annual curated selection of artworks by HSC Visual Arts students, from the 20 secondary schools across the Northern Beaches. 

To mark the occasion we have refreshed the project, following engagement with local schools and the Northern Beaches Youth Advisory Group, to deepen MAG&M’s support of young local creatives. 

As of 2024, the exhibition will be renamed as Out Front – with the 2024 edition titled Out Front 2024: Thirty years of Express Yourself. It will include a pilot mentorship program focused on supporting their transition to emerging professional creative practices. 

The exhibition will feature a broad range of expressive artforms that explore the contemporary themes which are of importance to young people today. 

This exhibition has been a part of MAG&M’s program since 1995. Presented in partnership with the Theo Batten Trust and MAG&M Society, the program has provided Youth Art Awards to aspiring artists for 30 years. The program demonstrates our ongoing commitment to connecting with secondary schools across the region and to supporting visual arts education.

The exhibition celebrates the extraordinary talent and creativity of young emerging artists from our local community and will feature a broad range of expressive artforms, demonstrating the diversity, spirit and artistic strength of our young local artists, as well as showcase the quality of teaching in Northern Beaches secondary schools. 

Theo Batten (1918-2003) was a well-respected local artist and journalist who won a Walkley Award in 1972. He travelled widely and trained at the National Art School. Theo was a member of the Manly Art Gallery & Museum Society and a member of the former Peninsula Art Society. He was a lively character and raconteur, and wanted to leave behind an opportunity for young creative people to continue their studies in the visual arts.

The Theo Batten Youth Art Award is offered to students pursuing studies in the visual arts or a related area (such as architecture, design, art education, music, performing arts, filmmaking, digital media etc) commencing in the year 2024. This Award will provide assistance with expenses in pursuit of their studies.

The Theo Batten Youth Art Award recipients for 2024 are:

• Joint Winner ($2000): Eden Stewart
• Joint Winner ($2000): Henri Tremauville
• Highly Commended ($1000): Sophia Hearty
  
   

Collection 100: New

19 Apr 2024 - 9 Jun 2024

2024 marks 100 years of public collecting at MAG&M. To celebrate, we are presenting a series of three special exhibitions throughout the year.

Collection 100: New is the second in the series. This exhibition will include works generously donated over the past few years by contemporary Australian artists connected to this region, or to MAG&M through its recent exhibitions. It will also feature paintings and ceramics given by private donors of artists whose artistic legacies now continues through MAG&M’s collection.

Tom Carment
Adam Cullen
Kate Dorrough 
Blak Douglas 
Fairlie Kingston 
Kathrin Longhurst
Fiona Lowry
Arthur Murch 
Luke Sciberras
Hadyn Wilson
Joshua Yeldham

We will take a deeper dive into the stories behind the gifts and artists to bring you unique insights into the works.

Built through the generosity of philanthropists, artists, donors and member groups including the MAG&M Society, and the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, we make visible the important role they have played in the development of this valuable community asset to the cultural life of our region, city, state and nation.

 

PLACED

19 Apr - 9 Jun

PLACED is an exhibition that probes how traditional and contemporary ceramics are instrumental in fostering a sense of place, belonging, and connection. Clay is true to place. Dug from the ground where running water has combined with the residues of flora and fauna and minerals to create a unique documentation of its origins, clay is intrinsically connected to place. For tens of thousands of years, this humble material has remained ubiquitous in our lives, while bearing sophisticated cultural traditions of making, function, form, and aesthetics.

Many of the objects in MAG&M’s ceramic collection reveal stories about Australia’s unique connections with place – Indigenous relationships to Country, waves of migrant stories, connection to landscape and nature, and contemporary relationships across the Asia-Pacific.

PLACED includes objects from the MAG&M ceramic collection and loaned works from three focus artists who bring a unique perspective to the theme, Mechelle Bounpraseuth, Ara Dolatian, and Rona Panangka Rubuntja. This exhibition provokes new inquiry into the narrative potential of our nationally significant ceramics collection.

Mechelle Bounpraseuth 
Mechelle Bounpraseuth (b.1985) uses her work as a way to understand and process the loss of cultural heritage, inherited trauma, and childhood memories. It is a way to navigate her own identity as the child of Laotian parents. Primarily working with clay, Bounpraseuth has also created zines, video, and drawings that explore these themes. Using humour, playing with scale, and by skillfully manipulating materials, she creates ambiguous objects, rooted in her own experience that connect with audiences in dynamic ways.

Ara Dolatian
Ara Dolatian’s interdisciplinary practice explores the relationship between cultural landscapes and the natural ecosystem. His ceramic works are hybrid ecosystem models of utopian cities and sculptural experiments. Dolatian’s work is also imbibed with numerous ideas centred upon conceptions of ‘the studio’ and the conceptual domain of socio-environmental politics. His latest exhibition, Mythos of the Island featured sculptural ceramic work inspired by archaeological relics. It examined cultural ecologies associated with lost and stolen artefacts within the Al-Jazira region, the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers also known as Mesopotamia. The works became tangible visual memories of sculptural deities, architectural forms and vessels, inspired by archaeological figures and decayed architectural sites.

Rona Panangka Rubuntja 
Rona Panangka Rubuntja (b.1970) joined the Hermannsburg Potters in 1998 and has established herself as one of the most prominent senior artists of the group, participating in over forty group exhibitions in Australia and internationally. Rona’s joyous style is distinctive, humorous, and imaginative, and her storytelling ability comes across most strongly in her figurative work. She remains inspired by contemporary life in Ntaria, and her work often includes depictions of cattle and brumbies roaming country, heading out to the outstation in a Toyota, and collecting bush tucker with her extended family.

 

TABLED

19 Apr - 9 Jun

In collaboration with chefs, cooks and artisan food producers, TABLED presents tableware designed and made by thirteen potters in this partnership exhibition with MAG&M and The Australian Ceramics Association (TACA).

The exhibition uses the terrain of the tabletop as the platform to discuss the age-old relationship between food and pots. 

This presentation of ceramic tableware will show the breadth of artists working with clay and with food. The collaborations between potter and chef will highlight their shared connections and shared respect for their crafts. Simultaneously, these creations will explore the narratives behind the function of tableware; community and culture.

MAG&M and TACA are pleased to announce the ceramicists and their collaborators who will develop work to feature in the TABLED exhibition:

• Kris Coad with Rhett D’Costa
• Kirsty Collins with Nathan Quinell and Craig Shanahan
• Paul Davis with Ito-en and Minako Asai of MinnieSweets 
• Janet DeBoos with The Wee Jasper Distillery
• Claire Ellis with Simone Jude of Seasonal Simone
• Malcolm Greenwood with Lennox Hastie of Firedoor and Gildas
• Georgina Yen Qin Lee with Raymond Tan of Raya
• Vanessa Lucas and Emma Jimson with Annie Smithers of du Fermier
• Jeremy Simons (Slip Ceramics) with Emma Knowles
• Leia Sherblom (GRIT Ceramics) with Ben Devlin and Yen Trinh of PIPIT
• Timna Taylor with Palisa Anderson
• Clare Unger with Anu Haran of Flour Shop

A special thank you to chef Peter Gilmore for his knowledge and expertise is helping select the finalists.

 

HELD

19 Apr - 9 Jun

Accompanying the TABLED exhibition in the adjacent gallery space, HELD deepens the exploration into what nourishes us. Presented on one continuous shelf around the central Rubbo Gallery, HELD features 90 small artworks by members of The Australian Ceramics Association (TACA). 

The works are utilitarian and sculptural objects that lend themselves functionally or narratively to the exhibition title, HELD. The depth and width of each piece is up to 15 x 15cm, and 40cm tall.

HELD; carry, bear, clasp, embrace, hold on to

As both a verb and a past tense HELD may refer to the experience of physically holding an object, the way in which the object holds or is a carrier, or the way in which a memory is manifested. This duality invites both functional and experimental works to be exhibited. 

This exhibition showcases the diversity and excellence of contemporary Australian ceramics, providing 90 TACA members with an opportunity to exhibit, promote and sell their recent works. 

 

Three Echoes: Western Desert Art

14 June – 28 July 2024

Curated by celebrated curator, writer, artist and activist, Djon Mundine OAM FAHA, Three Echoes – Western Desert Art showcases works by 57 acclaimed artists heralding from Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff), Papunya and Utopia Aboriginal communities in the western desert regions of the Northern Territory, Australia.

Artworks in this exhibition have been drawn from the private collection of Andrew Arnott and Karin Schack, and reflect the significant artistic developments and moments in time that contributed to the meteoric rise of the Western Desert Art movement. 

These paintings hold special meaning for First Nations peoples, communicating important stories of tjukurrpa (Dreaming) and Country. The relationships within families and ancestors; with flora and fauna; and the unique land formations are the foundations of this art. 

Three Echoes – Western Desert Art explores the poetic notion of echoes – how metaphorically and metaphonically we can echo a thought, a sentiment or a consciousness. In the 1970s Australian Aboriginal people from the desert began talking to the world through art, transferring their creation stories of the land and people to canvas. Now, in the 2020s, this foundational echo is going back and forth. No longer a one-sided, outward calling, it reverberates multi-dimensionally within wider Australian and global communities. 

Three Echoes – Western Desert Art is an initiative of Museums & Galleries Queensland developed in partnership with Karin Schack and Andrew Arnott, and curated by Djon Mundine OAM FAHA. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through its Visions of Australia program and through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.  It is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Communities, Housing and Digital Economy. Museums & Galleries Queensland is supported by the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation and receives funds from Creative Partnerships Australia through the Australian Cultural Fund.  

 

Katy B. Plummer: We Believe You Babcia

14 June – 28 July 2024

We Believe You Babcia  is a multimedia art installation about storytelling, Polish grandmothers, intergenerational relationships, and the often-untraced creative lineage of familial storytelling. The work is based on a thrilling ghost story, told to the artist’s children by their grandmother Iwona (a shy woman who grew up in Postwar Poland).  Iwona never dreamt of calling herself an artist, but has deeply impacted the creative lives of her children and grandchildren with her storytelling gifts.

This immersive installation recreates a moment from a story the artist’s rapt children would beg their grandmother to tell them, again and again; the story of how the 9 year old Iwona and her fearless best friend Ania broke into an abandoned, bomb-ruined, pigeon filled theatre in 1960s Wroclaw, and encountered a strange apparition: a group of ghostly actors, dressed in historical costumes, silently occupying a flooded stage.

 

Surface Effect: Ceramics Collection Stories

8 Dec 2023 – 28 July 2024

Ceramics, painting and printmaking, while considered to be different art-making mediums, share the characteristics of being intrinsically linked to the artist’s hand. When making a ceramic artwork, the artist uses their hands to shape, fold, and model the material into its final form. In painting and printmaking, the artist typically uses brushes and carving tools as an extension of their hand or body, making gestural marks on canvas, paper or plates.

The relationship between ceramics, painting and printmaking is a symbiotic one, with each art form influencing and inspiring the other. From ancient pottery to modern sculptures, ceramics have provided a canvas for painters and engravers to explore new techniques and styles. Likewise, the shapes, patterns, and colours found in ceramics have been translated onto canvas, allowing painters to create dynamic and visually stimulating works of art.

In Surface Effect, we’ve selected works from the MAG&M collection in which the connections between painting, printmaking and ceramics are made visible. Danie Mellor and Noel McKenna have hand-moulded and glazed their clay pieces and created the drawing and paintings on display. Printmakers Belinda Fox and Elisabeth Cummings have collaborated with Neville French and Barbara Rommalis respectively, and Guan Wei has commissioned the large vase upon which he has applied his hand-drawn painting with glaze.

In the exhibition, the lines between 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional art is blurred and the viewer is invited to consider the ways in which the aesthetics of each art-form influence each other.

 

Environmental Art & Design Prize 2024

2 Aug 2024 – 25 Aug 2024

The Environmental Art & Design Prize presents an opportunity annually for the Australian community to engage with the unique insights that artists and designers bring to our understanding of the natural world and the environmental challenges we face. 

The Northern Beaches has a strong relationship with the natural environment and sustainable living, as well as a long history of excellence in art and design. In bringing these themes together over the past three years, local creatives and diverse participants from across Australia have been inspired to contribute to an exciting and relevant exhibition that connects audiences with new ideas, innovative practices and critical reflection. The exhibition of finalists’ works engages audiences with contemporary arts practice, reaffirming the Northern Beaches as a vibrant hub of contemporary arts and culture.

Over the past three years, since 2021, the Environmental Art & Design Prize has enabled the works of 647 Australian artists and designers to be shown to the public across our three Northern Beaches exhibition spaces, engaged almost 10,000 audience members from the local area and beyond, attracted $45,000 in cash sponsorship, put $126,000 in prize money into the hands of 48 artists and designers in the Open, Youth and People’s Choice awards, and worked with eight key industry professionals to judge the Prize and announce the awards. 

We are delighted to announce that the judges for 2024 are fashion designer Genevieve Smart (Ginger & Smart), industrial designer Trent Jansen (Trent Jansen Studio) and visual artist Khaled Sabsabi (Khaled Sabsabi).

 

Clay on Country

30 August – 13 October 2024

Clay on Country celebrates the richness of ceramic practice in the central desert region. A diverse and eclectic survey, this exhibition includes the works by over forty artists. Established ceramic artists have been brought together with artists working experimentally and those incorporating clay as a medium in their multi-disciplinary practices. The artists have produced accomplished, insightful and contemporary works that reflect the culturally and historically rich and complex region where they live and work.

Clay on Country was developed by Artback NT to coincide with the 16th Australian Ceramics Triennale held in Alice Springs. The national tour is being funded by Visions of Australia. Curated by Visual Arts staff, Jo Foster and Neridah Stockley, it is a celebration of clay, community, culture and creativity.


 

Collection 100: SEARCH

30 August – 13 October 2024

The third exhibition in a series marking 100 years of public collecting at MAG&M, Collection 100: Search celebrates a major milestone for MAG&M – our Collection is now accessible online! 

One hundred images of rarely-seen works from our Photography Collection depicting the story of swimwear will be projected in the gallery to mark the launch of our Collection online.  The exhibition will also feature swimwear pieces from the Museum Objects Collection, and iPads to search the Collection in this open invitation for audiences to take a deeper dive into MAG&M’s 100-year-old public Collection.

The exhibition will offer a unique opportunity for our audiences to see large-scale, high-resolution projections of select Collection photographs, which were previously only available to view at the size of a computer screen – all supported by our informative stories and curatorial insights.

These 100 featured pieces have been selected from a list of over 700 contemporary and historic photographs in the Collection. The swimwear items were chosen from over 1,200 Museum Objects, which while important to MAG&M, are either too fragile or logistically difficult to display regularly.

A platform for discovery, learning, and pure enjoyment, MAG&M opens the Collection as a free resource accessible to everyone.