Nick Mitzevich Appointed Director of the National Gallery of Australia

On April 10, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra announced the appointment of Nick Mitzevich as director. Mitzevich will be leaving his current position as director at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide. He will commence his five-year term at the NGA on July 2, 2018. Mitzevich succeeds Gerard Vaughan, who announced his decision to retire in 2017 after being appointed in 2014.

Mitzevich grew up on a farm in the Hunter Valley, located north of Sydney, and was director of the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery for six years before taking up a post at the University of Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane in 2007. He was then appointed director of the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2010. During his term there, he was responsible for acquisitions, most notably of Camille Pissarro’s landscape Prairie a Eragny (1886), which the institution bought for AUD 4.5 million (USD 3.5 million), raised entirely from donations. He also ramped up the gallery’s annual visitor numbers from 480,000 in 2010 to 800,000 last year. In 2014, he curated the Adelaide Biennale, “Dark Heart.”

At the NGA, Mitzevich will be overseeing one of Australia’s largest collections of art, featuring some 160,000 pieces that span Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Asian, European as well as American pre-Modern and Modern works, collectively valued at USD 6 billion.

Sophie von Wunster is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.