In 1975 the Whitlam Government's Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections (the Piggott Committee, after its chairman P H Piggott) unsuccessfully recommended setting up of a Museum's Commission.
Exhibition review An Interrupted Dialogue. One of the first international experimental art exhibitions to be shown outside Hungary since the end of World War 2. Grayson worked with Suzy Meszoly of the Soros Fine Art Documentation Centre of Budapest in 1988 during the time when changes were sweeping through Central Europe.
Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art. Exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney from 31st March 1992. Article by the co-curator Robert Leonard.
According the the Australia Council figures in 1990 a number of people exceeding the entire population of Australia visited the 187 Australian Museums that employed paid staff in 1989/90 at a cost, for maintence, development and operations in excess of $13.00 per head of population, excluding any charges imposed on entry to museums or exhibitions. And what does $13.00 buy for the Museum going public?
Looks at the exhibition 'Terra Australis Incognita' at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand, to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Abel Tasman's discovery.
Helen Andreoni writes on matters which are addressed in the report commissioned by the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) by Amareswar Galla (also in this edition of Artlink).
On 23 October 2002, yet another Council of Australian Museums Associations (CAMA) ran down. Conferees were already half deep in thought about melting credit cards and distant work site desks stacked high with urgent files. Well Not exactly CAMA...
Cultural diversity has become a key issue in the 1990s for a number of reasons. In the United States we have recently completed a census. The results of that census indicate a dramatic change in the nation's demographics.
One of the things which continues to fascinate me about museums is how, despite the vast amount of talk about displaying material culture, the often personal, often idiosyncratic, often haphazard decisions about departments are very rarely mentioned. Yet these decisions are central to much of the museum's collection, display, exhibitions and research programme.