The AWAPAs highlight the vitality of arts publishing in the region and acknowledges the contribution of both emerging and established scholars, curators and artists. The Awards play a pivotal role in promoting the importance of writing and publishing in disseminating knowledge and understanding of the visual arts, craft and design. They are the only prizes in the Australasia region to celebrate the publishing achievements writers make to the field. Congratulations to the winners and highly commended of the AWAPAs for 2025.
BEST BOOK
Sponsored by Professor Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA
Judges Emeritus Sasha Grishin AM FAHA and Dr Nicholas Croggon
WINNER
Deidre Brown, Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, and Ngarino Ellis, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, Auckland University Press, Auckland
From the judges This book was the clear winner of this year’s AAANZ Best Book prize. Prepared over a twelve-year period, it offers a comprehensive history of Māori art that stretches from the time of the tūpuna (ancestors) to our contemporary moment. It is written by the esteemed Māori art/architecture historians Ngarino Ellis and Deirdre Brown, and was shaped early on by Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, to whom the book is a lasting tribute.
The story the book describes is far from the Eurocentric histories that have to date dominated art history’s engagement with Māori art (and indeed First Nations art globally). Instead, it lays out a whakapapa (genealogy) entirely shaped by Māori voices, concepts and methodologies of time, tradition and power, drawing in more recently formulated queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories. Yet despite its extensive scholarly apparatus, which includes a useful glossary and an extensive bibliography, this 616 page book remains highly readable, with beautiful design and images throughout.
While we may shy away from the idea of a ‘definitive’ account of Māori art and acknowledge that nothing is truly ‘comprehensive’, this is a long way ahead of anything attempted until now. It is an extraordinary addition to art history that offers a powerful challenge to the discipline’s lingering Eurocentrism, and constitutes a profoundly generous act of knowledge-sharing by its authors.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Christopher R. Marshall, Artemisia Gentileschi and the Business of Art, Princeton University Press
From the judges Christopher Marshall examines Artemisia Gentileschi’s career and determines how she established herself as a brand, independent of her painter father (Orazio Gentileschi) and husband (Pierantonio di Vincenzo Stiattes). The book breaks new ground, it is beautifully researched and well presented in a readable account.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Matiu Baker, Katie Cooper, Michael Fitzgerald and Rebecca Rice, Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa, Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa
From the judges This book is a multi-authored history of the 19th century conflicts between Māori and Pākehā, told through over 300 taonga from the Te Papa’s collection. To read the book is akin to experiencing an exhibition, one that gives agency to objects and artworks to tell a history that is grounded in deeply researched particulars. It offers art history and museum studies a powerful and innovative method for colonial institutions to interrogate their own past.
BEST ANTHOLOGY
Sponsored by the Australian Institute of Art History, University of Melbourne
Judges Dr Sarah Scott and Dr Giles Fielke
From a strong and varied field of submissions, including anthologies of writing on topics as diverse as art in conflict, object biographies and performance art, this year’s winner stood out to both judges for its clear-minded prose and cutting-edge format.
WINNER
Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa, Kirsty Baker (ed.) with contributions from Chloe Cull, Ngarino Ellis, Ioana Gordon Smith, Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Lana Lopesi, Hanahiva Rose, Huhana Smith, and Megan Tamati-Quennell, Auckland University Press, Auckland
From the judges At first sight, Sight Lines, may appear as an unconventional monograph, given its apparent genesis in Baker’s PhD thesis at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. However, this finely designed, scholarly, and expertly presented collection of texts, documents and images is undoubtedly a collaborative project featuring Wāhine Māori, Moana and Pakeha artists and writers with an outcome that challenges notions of authorship and positionality from the opening lines. As the author states clearly, Sight Lines does not aim to be comprehensive, instead featuring approximately thirty-five artists including art collectives, filmmakers and performance artists over more than 200 years. However, the careful selection of artists challenges previous accounts of women’s art in the 1980s and 1990s by examining the trajectory of this strand of art history with a critical lens, and by showing how the included artists have 1) “interrogated their relationship with the land and place;” 2) “pushed against gendered limitations;” and 3) “used their practice to speak back to the exclusions of art histories and art institutions.” Lana Lopesi’s essay stood out as exemplary for this approach, revealing in clear, poetic prose how previously “invisible” labour and collective care was foregrounded in the work of curator and performance artist Leafa Wilson / Olga Krause. For Tautai/Navigate (2016) at Studio One Toi Tū in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, it was contemporary art which focussed audiences upon practices dating back generations and across communities for Moana peoples.
As an anthology of writing about “art made by women artists in Aotearoa,” Sight Lines also comes in the wake of the world-beating success of contemporary feminist scholarship at a difficult juncture. At the forefront of our minds were Katy Hessel’s Story of Art Without Men (2022), as well as initiatives in Australia such as the ongoing Know My Name initiative of the National Gallery of Australia, whereby the Gallery acknowledged that in 2019 “only 25% of its Australian art collection and 33% of its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collection was by women artists” as well as exhibitions in Aotearoa New Zealand such as Modern Women: Flight of Time at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966–1993, Edited by Ann Stephen, with contributions by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Paul Wood, Allan Sekula, and Mel Ramsden, Power Publications, Sydney
From the judges This severe tome has already been praised as significant and useful collection of writing by and about the artist and theorist Ian Burn (1939-1993). Lovingly prepared and edited by Ann Stephen, Burn’s intensity, from the crucible of conceptualism, has cast a long shadow over the post-conceptual and post-modernist era of contemporary art. His influence, it seems, will only continue to grow, as new writers and theorists continue to encounter his work, and so a collection of this kind is not only timely, but stakes its claim by marking the moment Burn’s reception as a major figure of contemporary art steps into the harsh light of day.
BEST ARTIST-LED PUBLICATION
Sponsored by Monash Art, Design & Architecture, Monash University
Judges: Associate Professor Martyn Jolly and Dr Amy Spiers
WINNER
Archie Moore, kith and kin, Ellie Buttrose and Grace Lucas-Pennington (eds), Spector Books (Leipzig) and Creative Australia
From the judges A strong artist publication providing context to the Venice Biennale exhibition. As a beautifully designed object with white on black text, the book captured its relationship to Archie Moore’s Venice Pavilion installation on every level. Nonetheless, on its own terms the book reclaimed sovereignty over the archive through its exhibition documentation, thoughtful catalogue essays, and approachable interviews with Archie Moore, alongside examples of the archival documents he used to trace his family genealogy, all punctuated by poignant commentary and annotations. In an original but rigorous way, the book addressed a significant topic — the gaps and silences, and the racism and violence contained in our history.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Rosemary Forde, Art holds a high place in my life: DAMP monograph 1995– , 2024, 3-ply, Victoria
A compelling survey of an influential collaborative art collective arising out of Naarm/Melbourne in 1995. Well designed and laid out, with great documentation from artworks extending over several decades, the book will have an impact on continuing research into the field of collaborative practice. Its lively texture and energy captures the ephemeral nature of collective practice very effectively for the reader. The historical spirit of collaboration is continued in the contemporary research of the author in tandem with the artists remaining in the collective. Forde’s texts are engaging and informative, and readily accessible.
NUR: BEST CRITICAL ART WRITING BY AN INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN
Sponsored by Associate Professor Fiona Foley
Judges: Associate Professor Fiona Foley and Dominic Guerrera
WINNER
Pat Mamanyjun Torres, ‘Soul Journeys: The role of plants, people, and animals in the re-imagining and remembering of Australia’s First Nations artists’ lives through the BIITE art collection’, in All My Country, the Batchelor Institute Art Collection, Maurice O’Riordan (ed), Dr Wendy Ludwig (guest editor-in-chief), Batchelor Institute Press, Batchelor, NT
BEST ART WRITING BY AN AOTEAROA MĀORI OR PASIFIKA
Sponsored by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puno o Waiwhetū
Judges: Matariki Williams and Ane Tonga
WINNER
Deidre Brown and Ngarino Wellis, with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, Auckland University Press and Chicago University Press, Auckland
From the judges Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art is a true taonga for Aotearoa and for the wider world. Written by, for, and about Māori, the landmark publication traces 800 years of Māori art history, from ancestral beginnings through to the present day. Together, art historians Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis, and the Late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, stand like the ngā kete e toru — three baskets of knowledge — of which the publication is also structured. The three chapters – Te Kete Tuatea (basket of light), Te Kete Tuauri (basket of darkness or unknown), and Te Kete Aronui (basket of pursuit) – provide and emphasise a cyclical art history, using a range of formats from intellectually stimulating long form essays and shorter box topics focussed on individual artists, movements and events. Ultimately, this is a pukapuka of lasting significance, it carries knowledge forward, deepening and sustaining mātauranga for generations yet to come.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: the revolution reflected by the work of Robyn Kahukiwa in ‘Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa’, Auckland University Press, Auckland
From the judges Robyn Kahukiwa is undoubtedly one of the most beloved and revered of Aotearoa artists, one whose dedication to others is reflected in this essay from Rangimarie Sophie Jolley. The author and Kahukiwa have produced their own children’s book together which underpins some of the outstanding elements of Kahukiwa’s work that Jolley mentions: her love for Māori people and culture, her strength to use her work to stand against that which threatens our ways of life, and the way in which these narratives can be so deftly told with the powerful gaze so characteristic of Kahukiwa’s figures. That this essay was written by an author who can not only identify this in Kahukiwa’s work but who admits that she also benefited from when she was a young mother was a beautiful full circle moment to read.
BEST SCHOLARLY ARTICLE IN THE AUSTRALIAN & NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
Sponsored by the Power Institute, University of Sydney
Judges: Associate Professor Catherine De Lorenzo and Professor Ian McLean
From the judges The 400 pages of reading in the two journals from 2024 include a good range of genres. from artist exegeses and issue-based commentary by roundtable and other means, to the classic scholarly article. The latter have an obvious advantage when the primary criterion for the award is scholarship. Both issues also confirm the new mainstream in which the analysis of the aesthetic manoeuvres, vision and sociology of historical subjects and canonical artists and critics has largely given way to contemporary subjects, collectivism, the ethics and politics of image consumption, participatory practices, exhibitions, museology and the undiscovered.
Going against this grain is Edward Hanflin’s essay on Morris Louis’s canonical Unfurled series. We commend its fine argument, close pictorial analysis and expanded account of late modernism’s unfashionable formalism that greeted its critical reception. Equally commendable is Anna Parlane’s very different essay ‘Significant Others’, also is in the second issue. Her subject is the undiscovered Queenstown artist Leo Kelly. Parlane has an uncanny eye for unexpected leads, from canonical figures such as Robert Smithson and Donna Haraway to trending themes of mining history, anachronism, Outsider art, Catholicism, the virgin cult and right-wing apocalyptic politics. The pearls are in the chase for clues. Unpacking their blind spots and insights, Parlane shows how much can be extracted from, in this case, a plain looking collection of small rocks.
2024’s first issue is firmly in the contemporary camp. Edited by the Memo critic collective, a wide range of writers assess the recent controversial documenta 15 which also has collectivism at the heart of its method and program. The urgency of the subject is matched by the difficulty of conducting scholarly assessments in the smoke of its aftermath. A good start is made by opening the collection with Charles Esche’s provocative speech at documenta 15 and following it with a roundtable of responses to his claim that it is the first exhibition of a new post-Western era.
The remaining essays provide lengthier accounts from a range of views, making for a useful archival document. We have awarded the best essay prize to one of these: Terry Smith’s ‘Unintended Consequences’. Exemplifying Okwui Enwezor’s slogan to think historically in the present, Smith’s essay stood out for the clarity and thoroughness of its judicious account. Historically contextualising documenta 15 within a global field of experimental art exhibitions, it provided an informed background to the curatorial team, ruangrupa, and critically reflected on the substantive issues of the documenta, including initial decisions by documenta’s board and its ill-conceived handling of the far-reaching controversy and a summary of documenta’s national and global reception.
WINNER
Terry Smith, ‘Unintended Consequences’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 24:1 (2024)
This article raises some provocative ideas about the ethics of museum collection access and collection conservation where materials of significance to diverse colonised communities are concerned. Where discussion of such issues has often taken place in relation to Indigenous cultural material, this article considers the colonial collection from the perspective of the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia, an important and underrepresented viewpoint. The article draws out the complex, intergenerational dynamics at play in many diaspora communities and how this shapes the relationship between these communities and their displaced cultural heritage, highlighting the need for sensitive and wide-ranging community consultation when working to decolonise museums and their collections.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Edward Hanfling, ‘Not the (W)hole Story: Morris Louis’s Unfurleds’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 24:2 (2024)
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Anna Parlane, ‘Significant Otherness: Faith and Place in the Art of Leo Kelly’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 24:2 (2024)
BEST UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM EXHIBITION CATALGOUE
Sponsored by University Art Museums Australia
Judges: Dr Anthea Gunn and Dr Melanie Cooper
WINNER
Chinese Toggles: Culture In Miniature, Shuxia Chen and Min-Jung Kim (eds), Power Publications, Sydney
From the judges Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature is a revelation of quotidian objects: forerunners to netsuke yet almost entirely overlooked by collections in China and abroad. Edited by exhibition curators Shuxia Chen and Min-Jung Kim, the catalogue is a substantial record of an important exhibition, accessible and interesting to specialists and general readers alike.
Its originality lies in its collaborative approach, bringing together the Powerhouse Museum, Chau Chak Wing Museum, and scientists from the University of Sydney to combine cultural history, art history, museology, object biography, and material analysis. One of only two major collections known internationally, this publication documents the largest, providing only the third English-language publication on the topic. Chen and Kim also cast new light on their subjects, more than just the collection of Anglosphere tourists in Asia, these objects are given a multifaceted interpretation: including their physicality, miniaturisation and their symbolic resonance in Chinese cultural history. Richly illustrated, the catalogue, with exhibition documentation and bilingual didactics, will prove an essential archive.
BEST SMALL EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Sponsored by the University of Melbourne
Judges: Associate Professor Anthony White and Associate Professor Robert Nelson
WINNER
Angelica Mesiti: The Rites of When, Isobel Parker Philip and Beatrice Gralton (eds), Essays by Isobel Parker Philip and interview with Angelica Mesiti by Beatrice Gralton, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
From the judges This catalogue is beautifully conceived and designed, with lucid text, solid research, topical issues and full of wonderful images. It is also accessible, especially given the interview and the seductive photographs. Isobel Parker Philip’s essay displays originality and rigour of scholarship, and demonstrably contributes to knowledge in the field, which includes helpful references to adjacent disciplines, e.g. ecology. The writing is learned and ambitious but without being forbidding or alienating for the general intelligent public. There are numerous suggestive passages and much intellectual work with comparisons and interpretations. In all of these details, the catalogue matches the work of the artist, which is evocative and memorable.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Fiona Pardington: Te taha o te Rangi, Isobel Hillman (ed), Contributors: Dr Andrew Paul Wood, Philip Howe, Isobel Hillman, Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru, New Zealand
From the judges Though a relatively slight publication, this catalogue provides a delightfully enjoyable encounter with Fiona Pardington’s photography. The writing is lateral, funny, independent, risky and poetic. The range of references from First-Nations stories to Marcel Proust also reveals much learning, which is put to sharp evocative use. With all its command of plural cultures, the writing is highly voiced and invites personal engagement with the artwork. The analogies between birds and human specimens in European galleries and literature are imaginative and give readers the licence to use their own intuitive faculties freely to interpret the images in humorous sympathetic spirit.
BEST MEDIUM EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Sponsored by the Australian Institute of Art History, University of Melbourne
Judges: Dr Wendy Garden and Dr Karen Hall
WINNER
Alia Gadassik, Interlaced: Animation & Textiles, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth
From the judges We felt this catalogue developed a compelling and sustained argument for a reciprocal relationship between handmade film and textiles, oriented by Indigenous ways of making and thinking. It was supported by strong design choices that emphasised the interweaving of disciplinary practices across digital and analogue terrains.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Nicholas Mangan: A WORLD UNDONE, Anneke Jaspers and Anna Davis (eds), Contributors: Amelia Barikin, Suzanne Cotter, Anna Davis, Cameron Allan McKean, Marina Vishmidt, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and Lenz Press, Milan
From the judges This catalogue showcased thoughtful scholarship that not only argued for the timeliness and urgency of Mangan’s practice but also grounded in deeper histories, offering significant insights with wider applicability. The design, particularly the extensive Plates, situated the work within iterative process, place, and lineages.
BEST LARGE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Sponsored by the Australian Institute of Art History, University of Melbourne
Judges: Dr Sheridan Palmer and Professor Chris McAuliffe
An exhibition catalogue performs multiple functions, in a juggling act that demands the best of author, designer, editor and printer. It is simultaneously a document of record, a souvenir, a reservoir of knowledge, a forum for new ideas and a talisman conjuring visions of what art was, is and might be. In taking on the task, museums, artists, curators, designers and editors accept an additional challenge: in the attenuated field of Australian publishing, it is galleries and museums that shoulder the work, and the risk, of producing high quality, deeply specialised art books.
The judging criteria reflected these many demands, seeking original research, rigorous inquiry, innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship, complex ideas that appeal to a wide audience.
WINNER
Anne Dangar, Rebecca Edwards (ed), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2024
From the judges The winning exhibition catalogue delivered against all of these characteristics and judging criteria. And it’s worth pausing to think on just how complex and demanding that task was, how much thought, work and collaboration underpins its successful realisation.
The catalogue is an exercise in rediscovery, redefinition and realignment. Dangar’s life and work is presented in intensive detail, with consistent elegance and clarity in both writing and design. The story transcends the sadly familiar terms of ‘forgotten artist’: it traverses ambition, professional networks, art education, exhibition histories, collectives, communes, studios, workshops, love, desire, politics—both utopian and reactionary— all of the while complicating the terms of modernism, internationalism and identity. The catalogue is a work of reference, a compendium of data, but also a provocation, a quiet demand that the conventions of interpretation about art/craft, here/there, them/us, individual/collective, provincial/metropolitan be broken up and pursued in their malleability.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
From the judges Each of these publications exemplifies the capacity of an exhibition catalogue to support a sustained, challenging and energising engagement with the work of a living artist. They are both different in design and voice: one shaped by an elegant, reflective poetics of transnational identity; the other by the exuberance of a family album. Both use lavish illustration, rich information and rigorous inquiry to pursue the artists’ personal and the professional journeys.
mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson, Contributors: Katina Davidson, Tarah Hogue, Jazz Money, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Brisbane
and
Nusra Latif Qureshi: Birds in Far Pavilions, Matt Cox (ed), Essays by Michael Brand, Julie Ewington, Sugata Ray, Esa Epstein, Robyn Adler, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney