Staff at a major regional art gallery have quit over council intervention into the selection, display, and management of exhibitions – a change professional artists say has left them feeling “deflated”.
Four gallery staff members, including the manager and curator, have resigned from the Broken Hill City Art Gallery in the last month after a push from Broken Hill mayor Tom Kennedy to prioritise ‘historic’ paintings and those held in the council’s collection.
Kennedy says the gallery’s new management plan – which has yet to be unveiled in full – will involve greater input from council to ensure that local art is on display.
He told Guardian Australia that the region’s commitment to local art may “also refer to the many pieces in council’s own local collection”.
The statement has confused former gallery staff and local artists who say local art was already the priority.
Broken Hill council has a $10m art collection, which is one of the oldest in regional New South Wales.
“Council has a significant number of locally owned works of national and international significance within our own collection and we want to see those pieces on display more often for both locals and tourists to enjoy,” Kennedy says.
But that statement has also been met by pushback from former gallery staff, who say works from the council’s collection were already on public display after the reopening of the gallery early this year after renovations to the building. They planned to rotate the collection on an annual basis.
The difference of opinion about what constitutes local art has resulted in a public debate about the artistic legacy of Broken Hill, and how much influence councillors should have in deciding what is included in a public art gallery.
Changing signs, changing times
In an interview with local paper The Barrier Truth, Kennedy says the council would shift the focus of the gallery to “management rather than art curation”.
Curator Hester Lyon says that has made her role effectively redundant. She resigned this week.
“The curator brings knowledge and skill and an expertise of how to support artists to develop projects,” she told Guardian Australia. “And that is a type of sensitivity that can’t be replicated by a manager.”
She says she hopes her legacy and that of her colleagues in building relationships with local and visiting artists will continue under the new management structure.
“A regional gallery should be a place of care, nurturing and conversation, and artists are our most important leaders in cultural conversations,” she says.
Barkandji artist and gallery engagement officer, Krystle Evans, also resigned this week. She contests the idea that the gallery hasn’t been exhibiting local art.
“There has been a lot of work in fostering young talent, in the school programs and young artists programs like FRESHbark,” she says.
FRESHbark, a program for emerging Indigenous artists, was started in 2018 by former gallery manager Blake Griffiths, who resigned last month.
Senior staff member John Faddon also resigned last month, leaving the gallery with only one permanent staff member.
The resignations follow a string of moves by the council to exert control over the artistic and cultural landscape of the town.
Councillors recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Willyama Arts society for the right to hold an exhibition every two years. The agreement was flagged as a possible breach of the Broken Hill city council’s exhibition policy, which since 2020 has required artists to make an application to exhibit their work at the gallery, to be assessed against set criteria.
The Willyama Arts Society is a well-established painters group that have an affiliation with the Brushmen of the Bush – the painting group made up of Pro Hart, Eric Minchin, Jack Absalom, John Pickup and Hugh Schultz, who collaborated in the Broken Hill region from 1973 to 1989 and remain the region’s most well-known artistic export. The society has been exhibiting at the regional art gallery for 60 years on the basis of a handshake agreement that conflicted with the new application process.
Kennedy’s personal influence over the town’s artistic legacy began in his mayoral campaign last year, which included a promise to replace the ‘Welcome to Broken Hill’ signs designed by Melbourne artist Joe Scerri who won a public art competition in 2019.
In an effort to establish Kennedy’s brand of localism, the council will be replacing the signs at a cost of $21,384 each with designs by local Deanna Spicer, who petitioned the council to overturn the competition result.
Despite the criticism that local art has been absent from the gallery, local Barkandji man Bilyara Bates says that he has seen a lot of local art in the gallery.
“The latest exhibition that I went to was curated by recent staff members and the majority of the works there were by local artists,” Bates says.
The most recent exhibition curated by Lyon featured 29 local artists out of 33 works.
Gregory Carosi, an artist from Wagga Wagga, whose show Latitude opened at the gallery on 25 November, made a formal complaint to council after he was informed on opening night that he would not be able to make opening remarks about his exhibition.
Carosi was told the council had decided not to allow speeches, despite a signed agreement between the gallery and the artist which invites artists to make a speech at the opening of their exhibition. He says the show represented a two-year engagement with the Broken Hill region, and the way artists had been treated was inadequate, offensive, and unacceptable.
“It was a really deflating experience,” he says. “There was a very inspiring acknowledgment of country but after that the council representative, the only one allowed to comment on the works, seemed to me both unqualified and uninterested.”
Bilyara Bates, who gave the acknowledgment of country, says the gallery has become more inclusive of First Nations people in recent years and he hopes that progress will not be undone.
“It took a while to break down barriers to get more Aboriginal art in those gallery spaces, and that’s been something that has taken 25 years or more to do,” he says. “I’d hate to see that work undone and us go backward … we need to trust the expertise of the people that are qualified to do the job.”
