Brand joined the Art Gallery of NSW in 2012 and launched the Sydney Modern Vision a year later. Since then, he and his team have been introducing major changes to the curatorial direction; for example, the Yiribana Gallery, which displays works from the Art Gallery of NSW’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collection, has been relocated from the lowest level of the museum to the entrance level of the new building. Now, it is the first gallery visitors encounter in the new building.

“You literally had to go down all of these escalators to get to it, and people felt it was in the basement,” says Maud Page, the gallery’s deputy director and director of collections. She hopes the new location will encourage people to go through that gallery before continuing with the rest of their visit.

Yiribana, she adds, means “this way” in the Eora language spoken by the original inhabitants of Sydney. Relocating the gallery to the entrance and keeping its original name underline how the museum’s transformation is a major step in foregrounding Aboriginal art and culture. But showcasing the work of First Nations Australians is not new for the museum. Page says, “We were the first museum to commission cultural artifacts as art in 1958. They have been displayed within the gallery for a long time in a very prominent position.” 

But as people are becoming more knowledgeable and open to learning about and embracing different cultures, she feels it’s the right time for the museum to come up with more complex and meaningful juxtapositions of Aboriginal art to further conversations about issues represented in these pieces. “Let’s be real: it’s only when those conversations [about Indigenous culture and experience] become more nuanced that you can begin to have a more comprehensive curatorial approach, rather than just a simplistic [aesthetic display],” she says. “Otherwise, it becomes just a token.”

Page and her team consulted with Indigenous curators on a new approach to curating historic and contemporary Indigenous art. For instance, they placed a historical painting about sustainability and colonial legacy created in the 1800s—when Western immigrants started diverting rivers, which led to the flooding and destruction of a town—next to Red Tides (1997), an abstract piece about the red algae bloom caused by pollution in the Sydney Harbour; it is by the Indigenous artist Judy Watson, whose art is known for presenting the hidden histories of Indigenous experiences on the colonial frontier.

Page feels that this positioning allows for a more meaningful dialogue on issues that matter to both Australians and visitors from around the world. “In the past, we would have looked at that 1800s picture in terms of the historic artist being born in blah, blah, blah, that he studied here, he travelled to Europe a lot, and then he came back. It would have been very chronological in the way that the artist was explained, and then the picture would have been explained in terms of composition and other things,” she says. “What we do now is that we notice that the artist was commenting on sustainability and the effects of farming and white interference on the Indigenous country. That is what we’re bringing out—the thematics—and choosing to focus on.”

Currently, the Yiribana Gallery contains about 160 works of art. While this may not seem like a lot, it is a huge milestone in the recognition of the history of Australia’s Aboriginal art, which was first documented by Europeans in 1802. Before the 1950s, recognition of Aboriginal culture was confined to ethnographic studies and museums, not seen as gallery-worthy art. The museum’s then-assistant director Tony Tuckson, appointed in 1950, was the first in the museum’s history to develop a collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art by commissioning artworks from artists in the Tiwi community of Milikapiti (Snake Bay) on Melville Island, off the country’s northern coast. His pioneering action was met with racist reactions from critics who said the sculptures were primitive and did not belong in the Art Gallery of NSW. It was only near the end of Tuckson’s life in 1973 that his efforts became widely recognised.

Today, when there are more conversations about acknowledging Indigenous cultures and communities in Australia, Brand suggests that the museum has an important role to play in presenting their work to the world. “While Aboriginal art is well represented in Australia, I don’t think it has really found a proper place in international art museums, where, every once in a while, there’s an exhibition. I don’t think it’s as widely collected as it might be in international art museums, given how fantastic it is as an art form. A lot of people outside Australia don’t quite understand where it fits,” he says. “For me, it doesn’t really matter where it fits if it’s a fantastic tradition worth looking at.”

He observes that in Australia, there are two parallel and intermingling streams of contemporary art practice—the international, Western body and the Indigenous—and he wants to upend the world’s general impression of Indigenous art as confined to a thing of the past. He says, “A lot of Indigenous artists don’t use traditional media or imagery. Aboriginal art is one of those art forms which is very dynamic.” As an example, he names Aboriginal photographer and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt, whose work is collected by the museum. Moffatt uses the Western artistic mediums to foster Aboriginal culture by capturing contemporary Aboriginal society; her films divert from a documentary or ethnographic mode to offer a fresh perspective on Aborigines; she has never, for example, created art using a stereotypical Aboriginal style such as dot painting.

As well as Indigenous artists, the museum is increasingly interested in displaying work by Asian artists and has had a gallery dedicated to it—the Asian Lantern Gallery—since 2003. As Brand writes in the aforementioned book, one of the aims of the Art Gallery of NSW’s transformation is “to be an art museum that could take its place in what had become known as the Asian century, in a more interconnected and digitised world in which a fuller range of visual arts, including film, music and performance.”

The Sydney Modern Project commissioned new works by nine international artists to be displayed across the museum, with a number of them by non-white artists: a giant flower sculpture called Flowers that Bloom in the Cosmos (2022) by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a new giant bronze Buddha sculpture by Taiwanese American artist Lee Mingwei and a digital video called Groundloop by New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana. The new building also features Canada-based Hong Kong artist Howie Tsui’s Retainers of Anarchy (2017), a video work that portrays Kowloon Walled City with reference to martial arts stories.

“We consider the broadness of the Australian public, which is huge, and then we do what we think is the most interesting, and we make those connections [between visitors’ different cultures],” Page says. “With Howie Tsui’s work, I imagine that Australian people would be equally transfixed with it because in Australia we’ve also been brought up with martial arts movies, so it’s really embedded in our culture here as well.”

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Seven months after its opening, the Art Gallery of NSW has cememted its status as a cultural institution with a contemporary approach to both new and existing collections, and is looking to collaborate on exhibitions and other projects with overseas partner institutions. Brand also wants to further build relationships with artists in Asia by collecting and acquiring their works to enhance the diversity in the museum’s collection.

“There’s been so much interchange and interaction, culturally, economically and in terms of people in migration between Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, India and Nepal. [Asia] is a part of the world that we’re very related to. We want to make sure that, culturally, we are showing the dynamism of the region: both to show what’s happening in other places and for our own population,” he says. “We want to make sure that when people come into the gallery, they see either faces in the subjects in the art or names on the labels that look like their names. Because all the names and labels are English or European—that’s a very unfortunate thing for an art museum in Sydney in Australia.”

While that is a grand vision that may take time to realise, the commitment and conviction of the people running the museum make it easy to believe it will happen: “I believe in the power of art to change lives. An incredible way to contribute to society is by letting artists speak,” says Page. “Hopefully that shows a better way to live and to care for each other.”

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