Chatting with the IMAGinE 2011 winners

Below short videos that showcase winners of the 2011 IMAGinE awards and recipients of the 2011 IMAGinE highly commended certificates.

In our first video, IMAGinE award winners share their stories of excellence and innovation with us.

In our second video we talk with M&G NSW board member and gallery director, Belinda Hanrahan, about the significance of Special Achievement recipient Edmund Capon AM, OBE to our sector. 

 


Bob McKillop from Willoughby District Historical Society talks about their winning exhibition, 'The Tales of Flat Rock Creek' that explores the impact of urban development on a pristine natural environment since the European settlement, through the eyes of Willoughby residents.

The Bundanon Trust briefly explain their digitisation project for which they won the IMAGinE award for Collection Management- 5-20 paid staff.

Sharni Lloyd from The Glasshouse Regional Gallery discusses the exhibition People Of the First Sunrise, winner of the IMAGinE award Exhibitions and Public Engagement 1-4 Paid Staff. This exhibition was made in partnership with Port Macquarie TAFE, MCA and the Gallery.

To download a special brochure on the winners and highly commended click here.

If you've published anything electronically about the 2011 IMAGinE awards we'd love to post it!

To see the article on the posthumous honour of Glen Johns click here:

http://www.boorowanewsonline.com.au/news/local/news/general/top-honour-for-boorowa-man/2316585.aspx

To see the article on the Australian National Maritime Museum win click below:
http://anmm.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/imagine-award/
  
And the Grafton Regional Gallery received a trophy and a highly commended:
http://www.artsmidnorthcoast.org/grafton-regional-gallery-wins-at-the-2011-imagine-awards/

Arts Northern Rivers e-magazine covered the award and highly commended picked up by Grafton Regional Gallery
http://www.artsnorthernrivers.com.au/pages/news-latest-news-news-grafton-regional-gallery-wins-at-the-2011-imagine-awards

The IMAGinE Awards 2011

Around one hundred museum and gallery delegates gathered at the Australian Museum on Friday night to find out who would win a highly coveted IMAGinE award for excellence and innovation within the sector.

The night was a lively mix of jazz, wine, food, city views, mingling and, of course, accolades. The wonderfully cheeky yet charming MC Libbi Gorr kept everything going at a cracking pace, always telling it like it is in her own unique way.

The range of nominations in all four categories demonstrated the great work being done across the sector by both volunteers and paid staff from organisations big and small, regional and metropolitan across NSW and the ACT. Great innovation in public engagement was represented by exhibitions and education projects where museums and galleries continued to find new ways to connect to their communities. Fantastic collection management projects showcased the vital role of museums and galleries as custodians of our shared cultural heritage.

One highlight of the event was a special Lifetime Achievement Award presented to Edmund Capon for his considerable contribution to the museum and gallery sector of NSW over his 33 years as Director of the Art Gallery of NSW. M&G NSW board member Belinda Hanrahan provided plenty of entertaining insights from the several years she worked with Edmund.

Additionally, the significant contribution that individuals make to their communities through museums and galleries across NSW and the ACT was showcased with the highest number of nominations ever received in the individual achievement category.
And the awards went to:

COLLECTION MANAGEMENT

4 or less staff

Grafton Regional Gallery (Winner)
Eden Killer Whale Museum (Highly Commended)

20 or less staff

Bundanon Trust (Winner)
Hawkesbury Regional Museum (Highly Commended)

21 or more staff

Powerhouse Museum (Winner)

EXHIBITIONS & PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Volunteer

Willoughby District Historical Society Inc (Winner) For Tales of Flat Rock Creek
Port of Yamba Historical Society (Highly Commended) For Nursery-Rhymes Exposed – Delve Deeper than the Ditty’
Thredbo Ski Museum (Highly Commended) For The Kiandra Story

4 or less staff

Glasshouse Regional Gallery for People of the First Sunrise

20 or less staff

Casula Powerhouse for Body Pacifica

21 or more staff

Australian National Maritime Museum (Winner) for On their own – Britain’s child migrants
Australian Museum (Highly Commended) for Rituals of Seduction: Birds of Paradise
Museum of Contemporary Art (Highly Commended) In assoc with C3West & Hurstville City Council for The Begin-Again

EDUCATION & AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT

4 or less staff

Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (Winner) for GW Bot: the long paddock
Grafton Regional Gallery (Highly Commended) for The Postcard Station project

20 or less staff

Campbelltown Arts Centre for MINTO:LIVE

21 or more staff

Art Gallery of NSW for Open Weekend: art+soul

INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT

Volunteer

Glen Johns, Chapter Coordinator, Museums Australia - Lachlan Chapter

Paid staff

Gavin Fry, Director, Newcastle Museum

Congratulations to all the winning and highly commended organisations and indeed all who were nominated for the 2011 IMAGinE Awards. We had a fantastic night and hope to see you all again next year!

Only Three Days to GO until IMAGinE night

With only three days to go until the fourth annual IMAGinE awards things are certainly hotting up. The delicacies are ordered, the wine is cooling, everyone has figured out what frock they're wearing, and, most importantly, the nominees are awaiting breathlessly for the judges' results.

As well as the awards night we are also running a day of workshops, presentations and seminars on marketing and tourism at the Australian Museum. Called Talk the Talk, this is an unmissable event if you want to hone that digital strategy or get more punters through the door.

This Friday will certainly be a day and night to remember!

If you wish to register for the IMAGinE awards night or attend Talk the Talk during the day then click here.

But without further ado we know why you're here. And the nominees for Education and Audience Development in alphabetical order are . . .

Albury Art Gallery

Meet the Maker is a monthly program profiling regional established and emerging artists in retail. It offers the public the opportunity to understand the total creative process. The program presents unique opportunity for artists to communicate their craft to the public, to generate income from their art practice and fulfill the public’s curiosity about the professional expertise required in producing handmade objects. This program has initially fostered relationships between regional artists, the community and the Albury Art Gallery. Over the longer term, the retail products will become synonymous with the Gallery shop and support strong relationships between the Gallery and the artist.

Art Gallery of NSW

Open Weekend: art+soul. For the past three years, the AGNSW has hosted an annual Open Weekend that celebrates a particular collection area. The 2010 Open Weekend (held over the 2010 October long weekend) focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and was one of the Gallery's most intensive and rewarding programs. The weekend celebrated art + soul, which is the title of a major exhibition of Indigenous art at the Gallery, the corresponding comprehensive catalogue, and the ground-breaking three-part ABC documentary series written and presented by Hetti Perkins, Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, and directed by award winning filmmaker Warwick Thornton. This landmark Open Weekend brought together 60 Indigenous artists, writers, musicians, performers and academics from all around Australia, many who featured in the exhibition and TV series.

Campbelltown Arts Centre

Edge of Elsewhere engages communities across Sydney to develop and produce a series of contemporary art projects in partnership with artists. Developed through an open-ended curatorial structure, the project is conceived not only within the framework of geography—that being greater Sydney, with a particular focus on suburban Western Sydney and Sydney’s Chinatown district—but also through the cultural demographic of these particular places. Edge of Elsewhere has emerged from a strong history of community engaged practice that Campbelltown Arts Centre has developed through continuing to test new models of engagement between contemporary artists and communities. Through this experience and ongoing commitment, Campbelltown Arts Centre has identified that if long-term relationships between communities and artists can be sustained, the significance of the outcomes and level of innovation in the work produced in such contexts extends exponentially.

MINTO:LIVE was a large-scale site-specific performance event presented as part of 2011 Sydney Festival in Minto. The event brought together national and international artists to work in collaboration with the residents of Minto to create eight new performance works that reflected and celebrated the stories and experiences of Minto residents. The event ran for three-days and was presented in the form of a walking tour, with local volunteer ushers who accompanied the audience through public and private housing estates to experience contemporary theatre, dance, song and film.

Chifley Home

The Chifley Home Education Centre has been purposely designed and constructed in the house adjoining Chifley Home which was purchased by Bathurst Regional Council in 2008 with the intention of developing an Education / Interpretative Centre to support the Chifley Home museum and its significant collection. The development of the new Centre has been assisted by grant money from the Commonwealth and NSW State Governments together with continued financial support by Bathurst Regional Council. Its aim was to enhance and engage a broader visitor audience to Chifley Home whilst not comprising the integrity and intactness of the house museum and its original collection.

Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

As part of the exhibition GW Bot: the long paddock A 30 YEAR SURVEY an education kit was designed to enhance student engagement with the exhibition and provide vital ideas for teachers in developing theoretical understanding and practical artmaking experiences. The education kit is a comprehensive resource for preschool, primary school and high school students and contains information about the artist that is informative to the general public or anyone interested in learning more about GW Bot and printmaking.

Grafton Regional Gallery

The Postcard Station project was produced by Grafton Regional Gallery in conjunction with the Friends of Grafton Gallery FOGG to celebrate International Museum Day 2011. The Postcard Station project was a community out reach arts project completed at multiple venues across the Clarence Valley. Each Postcard Station was equipped with blank postcards and a selection of materials to create a unique postcard. Finished postcards were ‘posted’ in the Postcard Station mailbox. At the completion of the project every participant was mailed a randomly selected postcard created by another participant. If you made a postcard you received another in the mail! 

Powerhouse Museum

Reveal is a Museum trail where visitors uncovered small, fictional yet empathetic stories about museum objects by children’s author, Morris Gleitzman. The trail is a series of texts, written in invisible ink in dimly lit places adjacent to a featured object and can only be revealed by a black light torch. Reveal was the basis of a successful holiday program, an associated Sydney Writers Festival Event – Writer Overnighter and now part of the Museum's regular offer. Reveal incorporated hand-made puppets in the vicinity of each object, an illustrated print trail, three writing stations for visitor responses and a journey throughout the museum. As a children’s program it hit the intergenerational sweet spot proving popular with all the family members.

Tocal Homestead

"Tales of Tocal - The Mystery in The Creek" built on the success of "Tales of Tocal" dinner theatre at Tocal Homestead in 2008 and 2009. The true story of the discovery of a headless body in a creek on the Tocal property in November 1874 was retold through audience encounters with characters around the farm. The audience made their way around the buildings and grounds at twilight before enjoying dinner in the re-used hayshed. This project was to build a new audience for this site and in that regard well exceeded expectations.

mail!

IMAGinE Exhibitions Nominations Part Two

The 2011 IMAGinE award nominations have closed and as always we have been inundated with entries from throughout NSW. With less than two weeks to go we continue to highlight the nominees in each category as we warm up for a glamorous night of canapes, wine and awards at the Australian Museum's Terrace Room.

This week we're highlighting the second half of the nominees for Exhibitions and Public Engagement. 

EXHIBITIONS AND ENGAGEMENT: 5-20 STAFF

Campbelltown Arts Centre

Edge of Elsewhere is a major contemporary arts project that commissions artists from across Australia, Asia and the Pacific region to produce new works in partnerships with communities across Sydney. The Project is committed to the development of long-term relationships between the community and artists, sustaining these relationships for the duration of the project and beyond.

The River Project was a major contemporary arts project held at Campbelltown Arts Centre and at sites along the Upper Georges River, Sydney, Australia from 21 August – 31 October 2010. The River Project brought together Australian and international artists to explore the contemporary relationship of cultures to, and the issues facing, river systems in Asia and the Pacific. The project comprised an exhibition, publication, performance and community engaged projects, education and public programs.

Casula Powerhouse

Body Pacifica was successful in cementing the Casula Powerhouse Art Centres’ commitment to the Pacific Communities of Western Sydney and the broader community whilst generating partnerships across the creative and cultural sector. Body Pacifica was a celebration of contemporary and traditional pacific island cultures and also featured seven exhibitions in collaboration with the Australian Museum and the National Rugby League.

Mosman Art Gallery & Community Centre

Australian Accent: The designs of Annan Fabrics and Vande Pottery in the ‘40s & ‘50s revealed a part of Mosman's heritage which linked closely with the development of Australian design history and a growing sense of a modern national identity. This exhibition strengthened relationships between the Mosman Art Gallery and the museum and industry design sector and broke new ground in Gallery programming. This exhibition was the first time that Mosman Art Gallery (in collaboration with Mosman Library) had initiated a design based exhibition.

Newcastle Regional Art Gallery

Curious Colony, a twenty first century Wunderkammer was an exhibition held at Newcastle Region Art Gallery (NRAG) in 2010 as part of the 200th anniversary of Lachlan Macquarie’s swearing-in as Governor of New South Wales which was commemorated with a statewide celebration program. The selection of exhibition items included colonial works of art and objects referencing the era as well as the commission of a contemporary Wunderkammer reflecting on the Macquarie Collectors’ Chest, created in Newcastle, New South Wales around 1818 for Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and currently held in the NSW State Library

Sydney Jewish Museum

Serving Australia: Jewish Involvement in Australian Military History commemorates the wars in which Australia has participated, recognising the roles played by Jews serving in Australia’s defence forces and those supporting the Australian war efforts from home. The exhibition draws upon a large collection of diverse objects donated by the community. Each item tells a story of service, commitment and courage representative of the significant contributions made by Jews to the Australian Military.

Sydney University Museums (University Art Gallery)

The Japan in Sydney project included a curated exhibition, a bilingual catalogue (hard-copy and online pdf) and an extensive public and education program. The exhibition featured the University's collection of Japanese pre-World War II modernist prints, and a selection of works by prominent European and Australian modernist artists, sourced from public and private collections. The fully-illustrated, bilingual catalogue presented concentrated research by Australian and Japanese art historians and scholars, on European, Australian and Japanese modernism in prints

Tweed River Art Gallery

Surface Tension: the art of Euan Macleod 1991 - 2009 was initiated and developed by Tweed River Art Gallery and curated by Gavin Wilson. It is the first major touring exhibition of work by an artist considered to be one the finest painters of his generation. This survey exhibition of 47 works traces Macleod's oeuvre from both the Australian bush and his homeland of the South Island of New Zealand. Surface Tension presents major works drawn from public and private collections, the paintings showcasing the best of Macleod's practice

EXHIBITIONS AND ENGAGEMENT: 21+ STAFF

Australian Museum

Rituals of Seduction: Birds of Paradise is a traveling exhibition and invites the visitor to consider - are we more like birds than we think? This exhibition looks at how both birds and people engage in a variety of decoration, display and dance to draw attention to themselves (for the birds this is usually part of courtship rituals) - and at the close relationship between birds of paradise and people. It features magnificent still photography, film footage and mounted specimens showing the species’ range of eccentric attributes. Also on display are items from the Museum’s anthropology collection including wigs made from human hair and several magnificent feathered headdress.

Australian National Maritime Museum

On their own – Britain’s child migrants' is a traveling and online exhibition that traces the history of child migration schemes from Britain to Australia and Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries. This significant – and previously hidden – part of Australia’s history has not been explored in a major exhibition before. The story of British child migration is placed within the global thematic framework of immigration and child welfare policy. The personal experiences of child migrants are balanced alongside material illustrating the schemes, their motivations and their often tragic impact. 

MCA

The Begin-Again was a two-night art walk through Hurstville CBD. The event, created by Australian artist Angelica Mesiti, was commissioned by Hurstville City Council in collaboration with C3West. Mesiti created four site-specific videos and one performance that directly involved more than 90 local residents as performers in the story of their area. Each one of these works responded to community concerns such as the increase in high-rise development, traffic congestion and growing population, and how they affect Hurstville’s sense of connectedness.

The Museum of Australia Democracy

The Museum of Australia Democracy commissioned an artwork, in partnership with the Canberra Glassworks, to reflect the celebrations of Federation in 1901. Our aim was to create a work that embodied Australian communities’ celebrations of Federation, both in the artwork itself and, through community engagement, in the process of its creation. The resulting artwork, The Illuminations by Wendy Fairclough, is a collection of 20 blown glass vessels which echo contemporary domestic glassware, with a panorama of night-time celebrations sandblasted onto them. The panorama was inspired by research and hand-coloured photographs in an album in the museum’s collection

State Library of NSW

In 2010 New South Wales celebrated the bicentenary of the governorship of Lachlan Macquarie. The Governor: Lachlan Macquarie 1810 to 1821 project included a major exhibition with over 100 original items, presented at the Library in Macquarie Street; a touring exhibition with 40 original items hosted by regional galleries and museums; a display presented in western Sydney public libraries; public events held in 10 regional public libraries, presented by specialist Library staff and a display at NSW Parliament House highlighting the state-wide bicentennial celebrations.