Carriageworks, AGNSW and MCA Australia Announce The National 2019 Curators

On April 16, Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) jointly announced the appointment of four curators who will lead the second edition of the biennial The National: New Australian Art. The curators are Isobel Parker Philip, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Clothilde Bullen and Anna Davis.

Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, director of the MCA, said of the appointments: “The collaborative approach to The National enables our three institutions to profile the expertise of each individual curator. The 2019 iteration will be as curatorially ambitious and innovative as the 2017 exhibition, which was very well received by artists and the public.” 

Isobel Parker Philip specializes in photography and is currently a curator at the AGNSW, where she is responsible for the museum’s photography collection. In 2017, she was the coordinating curator of “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium.” She has curated exhibitions in a range of institutional contexts, most recently “An Elegy to Apertures” at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne in 2017.

Since 2017, Daniel Mudie Cunningham has been the senior curator of visual arts at Carriageworks. Previously, he held roles as head curator at Sydney’s Artbank, which facilitates acquisitions and rentals of artworks; and as curator at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Art Centre. Recent curatorial projects include “Good Neighbours,” presented in 2017 at Artbank; and “Loved,” which was on view at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart in 2015 and which then toured to Carriageworks in 2016.

Clothilde Bullen is curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections and exhibitions at the MCA. She was previously curator of Indigenous art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. She independently curated “When the Sky Fell: Legacies of the 1967 Referendum” at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2017. 

Anna Davis is a curator at the MCA. Prior to her role at the museum, she was assistant curator of contemporary art at the AGNSW and assistant curator at dLux media arts in Sydney. 

The National: New Australian Art will be presented across the AGNSW, Carriageworks and the MCA Australia, and is slated to open on March 30, 2019. The exhibition is part of a six-year initiative, during which there will be three editions of the show, in 2017, 2019 and 2021. Its vision is to exhibit a mix of emerging, mid-career and established artists from Australia.

Kayo Chang Black is an editorial intern of ArtAsiaPacific.

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