Queer Australian Art and KINK acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of the lands and waters of this continent. KINK conducts its work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation in Naarm Melbourne, the Turrbal and Jagera peoples in Meanjin Brisbane and the Gadigal lands of the Eora Nation, Sydney. We pay respect to elders past, present, and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.

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QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection

2022

Citation

Gott, Ted, Angela Hesson, Myles Russell-Cook, Meg Slater, and Pip Wallis, eds. QUEER : Stories from the NGV Collection. Melbourne, Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2022.

Includes these artists

Tony Albert

Tony Albert’s (b. 1981) multidisciplinary practice investigates contemporary legacies of colonialism, prompting audiences to contemplate the human condition. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, Albert explores the ways in which optimism might be utilised to overcome adversity. His work poses important questions such as how do we remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories? Albert’s technique and imagery are distinctly contemporary, displacing traditional Aboriginal aesthetics with an urban conceptuality. Appropriating textual references from sources as diverse as popular music, film, fiction, and art history, Albert plays with the tension arising from the visibility, and in-turn, the invisibility of Aboriginal people across the news media, literature, and the visual world. Albert has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include *Conversations with Margaret Preston*, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2021); *Duty of Care*, Canberra Glassworks, Canberra (2020); *Wonderland*, Sullivan+Strumpf (2019); *Native Home*, Sullivan+Strumpf (2019); *Encounters*, Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong (2019) *Confessions*, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart (2019); *Visible*, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018) and *Unity*, Sullivan+Strumpf (2018). Recent selected group exhibitions include *Occurrent Affair*, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2021); *NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney*, Sydney (2020); *The National 2019: New Australian Art*, Carriageworks, Sydney (2019); *Dark Mofo*, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania (2019); *I am Visible *commission, Enlighten Festival Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2019); *Just Not Australian*, Artspace, Sydney (2019); *Weapons for the Soldier*, Hazelhurst Arts Centre, Sydney and touring (2018); *Continental Drift*, Cairns Regional Art Gallery, Cairns (2018); *Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial*, National Gallery of Australia (2017); and *When Silence Falls*, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2016). Albert’s work is represented in major national collections including the National Gallery of Australia; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Brook Andrew

Wiradjuri/Ngunnawal, and Celtic artist Brook Andrew (b.1970) has made significant contributions to the art ecology with work spanning installation, photography and museum interventions. Andrew's practice takes interest in histories of colonisation, First Nations resistance, and the power structures of museums. His interdisciplinary practice challenges the limitations imposed by power structures, historical amnesia, stereotypes, and complicity. Léuli Eshrāghi has described the queer aspects of Andrew's work as inviting "the viewer to contemplate how architecture, social relations and cultural memory might look if Indigenous lineages to Ancestors, beyond the pale of assumed heterosexuality and docility to colonisation, were recognised." Andrew has exhibited internationally since 1996, with recent exhibitions being presented at Musee du Quai Branly, Paris (2020); Wuzhen International Art Exhibition (2019); Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC), Milan (2019); Musée d'ethnographie de Genève, Geneva (2017-2018); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2017); and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2014-15). Andrew was the artistic director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney entitled *NIRIN* held across various Sydney venues in 2020. Andrews is represented by Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.

Vivienne Binns

Vivienne Binns OAM (b. 1940) is a pioneer of feminist, collaborative and community-based practice in Australia. Binns’ first exhibition, at Watters Gallery in 1967, was widely criticised for its provocative and sexually explicit imagery. After the Watters exhibition, Binns embarked on a range of ephemeral, cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that precipitated her role as a leading figure in the development of community-based practices in Australia. Her career is characterised by a succession of firsts, including as a founding member of the Sydney Women’s Art Movement in 1974, and her participation in *An Exhibition of Homosexual and Lesbian Artists* at Watters Gallery in 1978, the earliest undertaking of its kind in Australia. Binns’ landmark work, *Mothers’ memories, others’ memories*, involved collaborating with participants at the University of New South Wales and then at Blacktown, a western suburb of Sydney, to record matrilineal histories at a time when women’s experiences were seldom valued or documented. Her subsequent work, *Tower of Babel*, continued her collaborative, feminist and community-based approach to production. Binns returned to painting in the 1980s but remained deeply involved with community projects. Over the following years, she worked as an educator, teaching painting, drawing and art theory at Sydney University, Charles Sturt University (Albury), and the Australian National University. She developed a reputation as a generous mentor to artists including Geoff Newton, Dionisia Salas, Trevelyan Clay, Liang Luscomb and Charlie Sofo. In 2021 Binns was the recipient of the Australia Council Award for Visual Arts, in 1985 she was given the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to community arts and in 1983 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for Services to Art and Craft. Binns’ most recent work in painting and assemblage is a way of processing her prior community and feminist practice as well as an extension of her concerns in the materials and methods of surfacing in painting. Her abiding interests are the function of art making as a human activity, which occurs in all social groups, and the manifestations of this throughout these communities. This is especially visible in Binns’ use of patterning and surface treatments, which connect historical art movements to domestic or familiar imagery. Binns has continued to exhibit regularly with her dealers: Watters Gallery, Sydney (until 1995), Bellas Gallery (now Milani Gallery), Brisbane and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Selected Binns' solo exhibitions include *Vivienne Binns: On and Through the Surface*, co-presented by Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2022); *It Is What It Is What It Is*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, (2018); *New Work*, Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2014); *Vivienne Binns – Art and Life*, Latrobe University Museum of Art (2012); *Everything New is Old Again*, Sutton Gallery (2008); *A Symphony of Uncertainties: In Memory of Unknown Artists and Scenes of Popular Reverie*, Helen Maxwell Gallery, Canberra (2007); *Vivienne Binns*, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart (2006); and *Vivienne Binns: Twenty First Century Paintings*, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2004). Selected group exhibitions include *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection*, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2022); *Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now*, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2020); *Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art & Feminism*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne (2018); *Painting, More Painting*, ACCA (2016); *Painting Amongst Other Things*, Drill Hall Gallery, ANU SOAD Gallery, ANCA Gallery (2018); *Pop to Popism*, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2015); *Lurid Beauty*, National Gallery of Victoria (2015); *Temperament Spectrum*, Sutton Gallery (2012); *Stick it!: Collage in Australian Art*, National Gallery of Victoria (2010); and *Cross Currents: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art*, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2007).

Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery (b.1961-1994) was a Melbourne-born, London-based performance artist, club promoter and designer. Combining dance, dandyism, music and outrageous fashions (of his own design) Bowery lived as a piece of performance art. In 1985 he hosted London’s outrageous and notorious club night, *Taboo* – the epicenter of young and fashionable London. His groundbreaking style influenced an entire generation of artists and designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, David LaChapelle, John Galliano, The Scissor Sisters and Boy George. He is also credited as a major factor behind the new Romantic music movement that became popular in London during the 1980s. Bowery passed away of AIDS-related illness in 1994 at the age of 33. His works are held in State Collections around Australia.

Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley

The artistic partnership of Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley was established in 1985 and engages with legacies of modernism that include a wide range of references from psychoanalysis to film, as well as minimal, conceptual and pop art. Burchill (b.1955) was born in Narrm/Melbourne and McCamley (b.1957) was Born in Meanjin/Brisbane. Both began making Super-8 shorts and photographic work together in the early 1980s. Their work is born out of a post-modern context, their opaque referentiality intertwines filmic and art-historical references. Rooted in feminist, Lesbian, and political art practices, their work frequently incorporates texts from Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, Valerie Solanas, and Simone Weil. Burchill and McCamley have exhibited widely around Australia since they began making together in the 1980s, having shown at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; among many others. They have been included in recent major group exhibitions such as *Unfinished Business*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2017) and *Tarrawarra Biennial: Endless Circulation*, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Healesville (2016).

Juan Davila

Born in Santiago, Chile in 1946, Juan Davila moved to Melbourne in 1974 and has worked between the two countries ever since. Over the course of five decades, Davila has produced a uniquely provocative, powerful, and influential body of work. Since the early 1970s, Davila has used the medium of painting to engage in debates around aesthetics, politics, and sexuality, drawing on rich and varied histories from Latin America, Australia, Europe, and North America. Davila has brought to high art the visual landscape of popular culture. As a visual archive, Davila’s works are not simply reflections of a society awash with images, but a carefully articulated questioning of the hierarchies applied to cultural material, and by extension, cultures. Davila opens up the hidden tensions that lurk beneath any official history or national mythology. Davila was included in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, in 2007. The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria held retrospective surveys of Davila’s work in 2006–2007. In 2015, Davila participated in The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art with a presentation of monumental paintings. A major survey of Davila’s work of the last two decades was shown at Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile in 2016. In 2018, Davila participated in the EVA International Biennial, Ireland and held a solo exhibition at MUSAC, Leon, Spain. Davila’s work is included in every major museum collection in Australia, as well as significant international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and the Tate, London. Juan Davila rejects the application of labels to his practice including “Queer”.

Destiny Deacon

Destiny Deacon (b. 1957) is a descendant of the KuKu (Far North Queensland) and Erub/Mer (Torres Strait) people. Since the 1990s Deacon's predominately photographic and video work explores the politics of Indigenous identity through humorous and provocative imagery that reconfigures and relies on racist and clichéd stereotypes. Combining autobiography and fictions, Deacon's works offer a viewpoint of Australian life from a Blak, queer woman's perspective. Deacon was the subject of a major retrospective at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia (2020). Deacon was included in the 10th Havana Bienal, Havana, Cuba (2009); Documenta 11, curated by Okwui Enwezor, Kassel, Germany (2002); and most recently *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection* (2021), presented at the NGV International.

Agnes Goodsir

Born in Portland in southwest Victoria, Agnes Goodsir (1864–1939) initially painted still lifes before applying herself to the challenge of portraiture. During the late 19th century she studied at the Bendigo School of Mines in Victoria under the tutelage of the artist Arthur Woodward, who insisted that students be exposed to international cultural circles. Goodsir set her sights on Great Britain and France, venturing overseas to “find herself” at the mature age of 36. She enrolled at the Parisian art schools of the day: the Académie Delécluse, the Académie Colarossi, and the Académie Julian. Her works were featured in the seasonal salons of Paris, gaining her significant attention and resulting in a steady flow of commissions. She moved to London (where she also exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Institute) prior to the onset of the First World War. Resettling in Paris in 1921, Goodsir made her home in Rue de l’Odeon on the Left Bank with her companion and muse, Rachel Dunn, who appeared in many of her paintings. In 1926, Goodsir was made a member of France's Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, one of few Australians to receive the honour. She returned to Australia in 1927 for several months, bringing a large selection of her work for solo exhibitions in both Melbourne and Sydney, and receiving significant media attention as a result. Goodsir died in Paris in 1939, leaving the majority of her estate to Dunn.

James Gleeson

James Gleeson (1915-2008) was regarded as Australia's foremost surrealist painter, though was also known for his simultaneous career as a prominent poet, critic and writer. Gleeson's interest in the Surrealist movement began after he read Salvador Dali's 1935 book *The Conquest of the Irrational*. Though his work remained invested in the realms of the subconscious and the psychoanalytic, Gleeson's practice shifted in its style and subject matter across his long career. In 1949 during three months abroad in Italy, Gleeson became fascinated by the work of the Renaissance painter Michelangelo, becoming a self-declared "classicist" for a time. Similarly inspired by Michelangelo and their shared identities as homosexual men, Gleeson looked to the nude male form as a symbol of beauty. In later work, he would turn away from a direct depiction of male beauty, eschewing more realist depiction for increasingly abstract and distorted forms as a means of showing the equal presence of ugliness in life. Gleeson also made contributions to Australian art history as a writer, including texts such as 1969's *Masterpieces of Australian Art* and monographs on the work of fellow Australian painter William Dobell (1964) and Robert Klippel (1983). Gleeson met his life partner Frank O'Keefe, a former designer for David Jones, in 1948. The pair lived together in their home studio in Northbridge, NSW (which Gleeson had built in 1952) for nearly sixty years until O'Keefe's death in 2007. The entire Gleeson O'Keefe estate was gifted as a bequest to the Art Gallery of New South Wales upon Gleeson's death in 2008.

C. Moore Hardy

C. Moore Hardy (b. 1955) is an Australian artist known for her extensive photographic documentation of the Sydney queer community since the late 1970s. Hardy's work has encompassed both freelance and commercial photography, featuring candid portraiture of community events, most notably the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and in particular minority groups within the LGBTQI+ community. She successfully ran Starfish Studio Photography Studio/Gallery in Clovelly, NSW for 15 years. Her portraiture of Mardi Gras and minority groups within the LGBTQI+ community have created an archival legacy which speaks to the changing generational understandings and attitudes of and towards the Sydney queer community. Recently exhibited in NAS Gallery’s *Museum of Love and Protest* 2018, exhibition, Hardy spoke to the importance of photographic timing, having a visual language, a social conscience, community, feminism and art. Hardy completed a Printmaking and Photography Higher Art Certificate at the National Art School in 1989, and has also studied at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Technology Sydney, and Randwick TAFE.

Brent Harris

Brent Harris (b. 1956) is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists, widely recognised as both a painter and printmaker. Born in Te Papaioea Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand, Harris moved to Melbourne in 1981 and began his studies at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) the subsequent year. Throughout much of his career, Harris has explored the psychoanalytically-charged space between abstraction and figuration. Consistent with this has been his fascination with the subconscious and dream states. Harris’ compositions at times pulse with libidinal energies, though the drives and memories they draw from are often disquieting. Harris’ exploration of this terrain is guided by his close study of artists and art history; as well as reflections on his personal and familial histories. At times this has extended to responses to current events which have had a distinct impact on Harris’ life and those around him, such as in 'The Stations' (1989) series. Through hard edge geometric abstract forms, this group of fourteen paintings and corresponding series of aquatints describes Harris’ reflection on the impacts of the HIV/AIDS crisis via the biblical narrative of Jesus Christ’s journey through judgement to death. Harris’ also draws particular inspiration from his dedicated studio practice, where he privileges chance, intuition and experimentation as sources for creative insight. Across a career of nearly four decades, Harris’ art has been the subject of a number of major solo exhibitions including Just a Feeling: Brent Harris Selected works 1987–2005, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, curated by Bala Starr; and Swamp Op, Art Gallery of Western Australia, curated by Robert Cook (both 2006). In 2012 a significant monographic exhibition opened at the NGV International, Naarm Melbourne, curated by Jane Devery (2012). Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki presented in 2023 Harris’ first major solo survey exhibition in Aotearoa New Zealand, The Other Side, also curated by Devery. Later that year, Harris’ first retrospective Surrender & Catch, curated by Maria Zagala, premiered at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, and in 2024 the exhibition toured in an expanded form to the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Ponch Hawkes

Ponch Hawkes (b. 1946) is an Australian photographer and writer. A large part of Hawkes work documents Australian society and cultural life since the 1970s. Some of this has centered on queer identity and LGBTQI+ politics and communities. Hawkes' work stands out for documenting Lesbian women intimacy and communities, a rarity in a field that prioritises gay male perspectives. Hawkes' work through a commentary on Australian social movements speaks to the interconnected histories of feminist and LGBTQI+ movements. Although not confined to one particular thematic, Hawkes' work spans decades and the oeuvre represents an ongoing interrogation of the personal foundations that defined late 20th century Australian culture, for example sport, masculinity, intergenerational relationships, and labour. In 1989, her solo exhibition *Generations* was held at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (NGV). Her book *Best Mates: A Study* was published in 1990. A survey exhibition of Hawkes’ work was held in 1999 at the Glen Eira City Gallery and toured six venues. In 2020 she began the ground-breaking project *500Strong – 464 portraits of women over 50 naked*, dealing with themes of ageing, health and visibility, which is currently touring. In 2022 Hawkes' *No title (Two women embracing, 'Glad to be gay’)* (1973) was used as the main poster image for *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection* at the NGV. Hawkes' work is held in collections around Australia including the NGV, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; among others.

Brenton Heath-Kerr

Brenton Heath-Kerr (1962-1995) was a performance artist and costume designer/maker who lived and worked in Sydney, Australia. Heath-Kerr died of HIV/AIDS-related complications in 1995. Heath-Kerr designed and performed in his disruptive costumes in Sydney’s queer nightlife scene. Grappling with declining health, his designs came to address his own mortality, exemplified by an intervention in the now unwearable costume *Self Portrait in Latex* (1994). Each of Heath-Kerr’s designs resonates with elements of fashionable modernism, from the Surrealist escapades of Dior, Schiaparelli, Dali and Jean Cocteau to the post modern anything goes antics of Andy Warhol, Leigh Bowery, Vivienne Westwood or Madonna. The artist’s repertoire has a common subtext which arouses the spontaneity, genderbender chic and nonsensical traits of Dada. Heath-Kerr wore *Self Portrait in Latex* (1994) to the opening of *Don't Leave Me This Way Art in the Age of AIDS* at the National Gallery of Australia. Many of Heath-Kerr’s costumes and sketches are held in the Powerhouse Museum’s collection in Sydney, Australia.

Ruth Hollick

Ruth Hollick (1883-1977) was a Melbourne based artist and photographer who studied at the National Gallery School and was taught by Frederick McCubbin. In 1908 Hollick began her career as a portrait photographer particularly focusing on group portraits of families, especially mothers with their children. In 1918 Hollick and her partner Dorothy Lzard took over a studio in the Auditorium Building at 167 Collins Street, Melbourne. Later occupying a whole floor of Chartres House at 163 Collins Street. During the 1920s and early 1930s in partnership with Lzard, Hollick became a highly successful society and fashion photographer in Melbourne. As well as her images regularly appearing in the pages of *Table Talk*, the *Bulletin*, *Lone Hand*, *Home*, and the *Australian* magazine. Her work was also regularly exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including the Chicago Photographic Exhibition and London Photographic Salon of 1927 and the Amateur Photographer Overseas Exhibition in London in 1932. Hollick’s career was significantly effected by both the Great Depression and World War II and although she continued to work out of her home studio in Moonee Ponds she didn’t attain the same success as she did in the 20s and 30s. Much of her work has since vanished as it predominately circulated in the domestic sphere, however, she is still regarded as one of the most prolific Australian female photographers from the period.

David McDiarmid

David McDiarmid (1952–1995) was a leading gay activist and artist who worked in Melbourne, Sydney and New York. As an early gay liberation activist, he wrote for and illustrated the *Sydney Gay Liberation* newsletter and *Gay Liberation Papers*. His first gallery exhibition in Sydney in 1976 focused on gay male identity and sexual liberation themes. McDiarmid’s creative output encompasses art, design, craft, fashion and music. It also sits at the intersection of activism, art, and community art, with gay rights and identity politics being the primary focus in his contemporary art and graphic design. He moved to New York in 1979 where he lived and worked until 1987. Reflecting on his own work in 1992 he said: “I wanted to express myself and I wanted to respond to what was going on and I wanted to reach a gay male audience. I wanted to express very complex emotions and I didn’t know how to do it . . . I was in a bit of a dilemma. I thought, well, how can I get across these complex messages. I didn’t think it was simply a matter of saying gay is good.” McDiarmid designed posters for Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Pride and Leather parties, safe sex and World AIDS Day campaigns and he was artistic director of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. He was diagnosed HIV positive in New York 1986 and from his return to Australia in 1987 his work was concerned with HIV/AIDS experience and politics. His famed *Safe Sex* and *Safe Injecting* posters of 1992 designed for the AIDS Council of NSW were an international sensation after they were shown at the 1993 international AIDS conference in Berlin. The *Rainbow Aphorisms*, a series of digital works created between 1993 until shortly before McDiarmid's death of AIDS-related conditions in 1995, is a key example of his political savvy and wit, combining gay and queer activism with tongue-in-cheek statements, pointed truths, and messages of hope. His work has been widely collected by institutions and in 2017–18 his *Rainbow Aphorisms* featured throughout the London Underground transport network as part of the ongoing *Art on the Underground* program, a presentation initiated by London's Studio Voltaire and the David McDiarmid estate. In 2014, McDiarmid was the subject of the major survey exhibition *David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me* at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. His work continues to be shown internationally.

Luke Roberts

Luke Roberts (b. 1952) is an artist primarily known for performance, video, and photographic works. Since the late 1970s Roberts’ work has collapsed the personal and the political, blending themes of cosmology, religion, and science-fiction to reimagine how we engage with sexuality, spirituality, and human history. His ground-breaking performances under the alter-ego Alice Jitterbug were unlike any other artist working in Australia at the time. Working in an era when homosexuality in Queensland was illegal and persecuted under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen Government, his work is a testament to the radical potential of a queer sensibility. Many of Roberts’ early works are situated in his rural upbringing and outback folklore, developing in later years into an interest in how we read and are seduced by history – which turns into future myths. Roberts’ most recent ongoing performance persona is her Divine Holiness Pope Alice, Ambassadress from Infinity and Manifestation of Extraterrestrial Consciousness. This mythical alter-ego character draws on Roberts’ ongoing interest in Roman Catholicism and other forms of religion and spiritualism with science fiction. Rather than embracing religion, his works imply an anti-clerical, kitsch, and occult attitude. Roberts’ oeuvre is idiosyncratic, with a multitude of mythologies built around the characters he has embodied, with the work or performance destabilising the local and cosmological with the past, present, and future. Roberts’ major survey *AlphaStation/Alphaville* in 2010–11 was exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. In 2015, Pope Alice performed at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2019, Roberts was included in *The National 2019: New Australian Art* at Carriageworks, Sydney. In 2022, Roberts performed at Dark Mofo, Museum of New and Old Art, Tasmania, and was included in *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection* at the National Gallery of Victoria International (NGV), Melbourne. Roberts work is held in many institutional collections in Australia including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; NGV, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Home of the Arts, Gold Coast (HOTA); Griffith University Art Collection, Brisbane; Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; Rockhampton Art Gallery, Rockhampton; and the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.

Ross T. Smith

Ross T. Smith (b. 1961) is a Ngāpuhi/Māori photographer who has lived between both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Smith studied fine art photography in Melbourne at the Australian College of Photography Art and Communication between 1987 and 1990. In particular, Smith is known for his photographic series such as *Hokianga* (1997–98), held in the permanent collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and *Hemi Tuwharerangi Paraha* (1999) in which these two bodies of work position the image of young Māori men and women within the remote New Zealand landscape. In these complex series of portraits, Smith depicts the figure in varying states of strength and fragility, eschewing evocative documentary portraiture to consider the restrictions of identity and representation in a marginalised group. Smith is known within Australia for his large-scale photographic composition *L’amour et la mort sont la même chose* (1990–92), held within the National Gallery of Victoria collection and exhibited within *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection* (2022), *TRANSMISSIONS: Archiving HIV/AIDS, Melbourne 1979–2014*, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne (2014), and *Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS* (1994), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Smith's work is held in various Australian, New Zealand, and international collections.

Jeffrey Smart

Jeffrey Smart AO (1921–2013) was born in Adelaide, though spent most of his working life abroad in Italy, leaving Australia for Rome in 1963. Smart passed away at home in Arezzo, Tuscany in 2013. During his long and significant career, Smart established himself as a popular and critically regarded artist in Australia. Despite his success being focused particularly within his country of birth, Smart connected with international styles and approaches, looking to the work of the French painter Paul Cézanne, Italian painter Piero della Francesca and northern Renaissance artist Rogier van der Weyden as points of inspiration. In 1948, Smart travelled to Paris to study under the French cubist Fernand Léger at the Académie Montmartre. Smart was acclaimed especially for his urban and industrial landscapes which sustained a distinctive, highly-finished style that generate an uncanny sense of reality. Within Smart's urban scenes, human figures are frequently divided by the architecture of city space, suggesting a quality of alienation from modern living, perhaps relevant to the artist's sexuality and sense of dislocation from Australian culture. The late artist's paintings are held in major public and private collections in Australia and also overseas including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

TextaQueen

TextaQueen (b. 1975) is a multi-genre artist of Goan descent living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Known for using the humble felt-tip marker to create majestic portraiture, their work complicates assumptions around identities at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and ability. Their practice envisions an ever-expanding alternate universe of collective and transformative possibility, centring those not often witnessed in states of empowerment. Encompassing drawing, painting, printmaking, video, performance, curating, music, writing and murals—in collaboration with other displaced and diasporic people—they deliver irreverent satire in enticing colour and detail that disrupts all the “isms” entrenched in the status quo. Texta contemplates dis/connection to cultural and colonial legacies, interrogating the many ways in which they find themselves precariously balanced across ancestral and stolen lands. TextaQueen’s work has appeared at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London; and Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany; and is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Monash University of Modern Art, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Mural commissions include de Young Museum, San Francisco; Murray Art Museum Albury, Albury; City of Moreland, Melbourne; and City of Melbourne. They have had mentorships with Emory Douglas and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina in Oakland, California; a 2017 State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship; and residencies at ACME, London; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; and QAGOMA. A mid-career survey exhibition toured nationally via Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in 2017.

Peter Tully

Peter Tully (1947–1992) was an artist, jeweller, costume designer, and gay community activist based in Sydney, Australia. As the inaugural artistic director (1982–86) of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Tully made a significant contribution to Australian gay cultural expression and Sydney’s nightlife in the 1980s and '90s. Tully met fellow artist David McDiarmid in 1973. The two were lovers for two years and remained friends and collaborated on numerous projects until Tully's untimely death in 1992. His fashion output has been recognised in exhibitions such as *Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson: Flamingo Park and Bush Couture* (1985) at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. A Tully Australiana-themed necklace was featured on an Australian postage stamp in 1988. His iconic *New Age Business Suit* appeared in *Australian Fashion: The Contemporary Art* (1989–90), held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and in Tokyo and Seoul. Collaborating with Ron Smith, he applied his skills in the design and fabrication of large-scale popular visual structures to the floats and costumes for ‘Expo ’88’ in Brisbane, and conceived installations for the traveling Australian Bicentenary Exhibition. A retrospective exhibition, *Peter Tully: Urban Tribalwear and Beyond*, was mounted at the National Gallery of Australia in 1991. His last exhibition was the June 1992 presentation of Australian artists at the Société de la Propriété Artistique et des Dessins et Modèles gallery, Paris. Tully's works are held in various museums and collections around Australia. Tully died of AIDS-related illness in Paris in 1992, at the age of 45.

William Yang

William Yang (b. 1943) is a Sydney-based photographer and pioneer of LGBTQI+ Australian photographic practice. Born in Mareeba, just outside of the northern Queensland city of Cairns, Yang became recognised for his emotive documentation of Sydney's queer scene after moving to the capital of New South Wales in the late 1960s. Yang's photographs record in intimate and moving detail the emergence and impact of HIV/AIDS on his friends and broader community within the city in the 1980s. Yang's work also engages with his identity in relation to his Chinese-Australian ancestry, and familial relationships and histories. The artist is known particularly for his technique of inscribing photographic prints with commentary and reflections that broaden the frame of the image, integrating photography and memoir to create a hybrid life-image writing. Yang's work has featured in significant group exhibitions both interstate and internationally, including *World Without End*, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2000); *Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS*, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (1994); *Life Lines*, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2009); *On the Edge: Australian Photographers of the 1970s*, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (1998); *Sydney Photographed*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1994); and *From Bondi to Uluru*, Higashikawa Arts Centre, Hokkaido (1993). The artist's practice has been surveyed in a number of prominent retrospectives and solo presentations including *Diaries*, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (1998); *William Yang: Australian Chinese*, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2001); and *William Yang: Seeing and Being Seen*, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (2021). His works are held in major state galleries, as well as the National Gallery of Australia and National Portrait Gallery.

Bessie Gibson

Bessie Gibson (1868-1961) was an artist born in Ipswich, Queensland, known for her impressionist style and her rejection of the radical aspects of modernism. Gibson studied under Godfrey Rivers at the Brisbane Central Technical College, where she developed an interest in miniature painting. After visiting relatives in Scotland in 1901-02, she was inspired to study abroad and moved to Paris in 1905. Her family favoured her painting career and supported her for three years. Gibson settled in Paris, found herself a flat in Montparnasse, and had an intimate friendship with another Brisbane painter, Anne Alison Greene (1878-1954). In Paris, Gibson established a studio on Rue Campagne Première. Gibson studied at the Castelucho and Colarossi ateliers under Frances Hodgkins and the American Edwin Scott. Additionally, she pursued miniature painting under Gabrielle Debillemont-Chardon. Gibson regularly exhibited in the then-decaying system of Salon and Royal Academy exhibitions between 1905 and 1923. From 1913 to 1939, Gibson exhibited annually at either the Société des Artistes Français or the Salon d'Automnes. When Greene moved back to Queensland because of illness, Gibson followed shortly after, returning to Australia in 1947. At the time, Gibson's work was relatively unknown in Australia; however, she went on to regularly exhibit in Sydney and Melbourne. Today, Gibson's paintings are held in State Galleries and Museums throughout Australia.

Paul Yore

Paul Yore (b. 1988) works across installation, sound, video, collage, assemblage and textiles, often employing needlepoint, quilting, and appliqué techniques. Narratives of kitsch Australiana collide with sexually and politically loaded images, and popular culture reference to make up Yore’s uniquely garish, playful, provocative and politically astute works. His anarchic and anti-formalist approach to materials and content results in a visual cacophony of imagery and text that critiques the upheaval and dysfunction of contemporary society. Yore brashly and unapologetically re-centres radical and emancipatory queer expression against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the material excesses of capitalism. Yore has exhibited in major institutions across Australia and internationally, including in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, the UK and USA. His work is held in various public and private collections, in Australia and internationally, including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Textile Art Museum, Ararat; Artbank, Australia; Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Ballarat, VIC; Bendigo Art Gallery, VIC; Wangaratta Art Gallery; VIC; Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne; and Si Shang Art Museum, Beijing. Yore has been included in important international publications, including Phaidon’s *Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art* and Thames & Hudson’s *Threads: Contemporary Embroidered Art*. A significant survey exhibition, *Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH* was presented by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, in 2022, accompanied by a comprehensive artist monograph.

William Dobell

Sir William Dobell (1899–1970) was an acclaimed painter known for his expressive and vivid portraits. He was an apprentice to an architect and studied in Sydney before leaving for Europe in 1929. In Europe he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London under Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson. He paid close attention and studied works by Rembrandt, Renoir, Turner, Constable, Van Gogh and Ingres. During his time in London he developed a close friendship with the Australian artist Donald Friend. In 1939 Dobell returned to Sydney after the passing of his father. After his return to Sydney he worked on a series of Australian ‘types’ that exuded the characteristics of the European tradition her had observed in London. He was conscripted in 1941 and served as an official war artist, documenting the efforts of the Civil Construction Corps. In 1942 Dobell shared an exhibition with Margaret Preston at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1954 Dobell represented Australia at the Venice Biennale alongside Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan.

Drew Pettifer

Drew Pettifer (b. 1980) is an artist and academic based in Naarm Melbourne. Working across photography, video, print, performance, sculpture, textiles, and installation, his practice explores queer history, the archive, power, desire, representation, and contemporary social politics. He uses creative practice as a vehicle to foreground critical queer histories which have been systematically under-represented or excluded from dominant archives. Recent exhibitions include: *Closer Together*, Hong Kong Arts Centre (2024); *Melbourne Now*, National Gallery of Victoria (2023); *Forget Me Not: A queer end to the bushrangers*, Sarah Scout Presents (2023); *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection*, National Gallery of Victoria (2022); *Too Much is Never Enough*, Space Place Gallery, Russia (2021); *XX*, Hong Kong Art Centre (2020-21); *A Sorrowful Act: The Wreck of the Zeewijk*, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth (2020); *Obsession: Devil in the Detail*, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington (2019); and *Equal Love*, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2018). His work is held in various collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Museum of Australian Photography and City of Melbourne's Arts and Heritage Collection, as well as private collections nationally and internationally.