Category Archives: Advocacy

Advocacy | Letter to UNSW on staff cuts and changes to the Faculty of Art and Design | Add your signature

Advocacy

The AAANZ committee invites members to add their name to the following letter to be sent in support of our colleagues at UNSW where proposed staff cuts and faculty mergers are likely to affect academics working in art history, theory and practice. Read the letter below and add your signature via this link (opens a Google Doc, scroll to end and add name and affiliation, no need to log in). UPDATE – the letter has been closed to new signatures to be forwarded to UNSW. AAANZ is dedicated to offering support to members affected by the current cuts facing staff […]

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Advocacy | Letter to The Hon Paul Fletcher MP to reverse the decision to cut 10% of staff at the National Gallery of Australia

Advocacy, News

On Monday 6 July, the Executive Committee of the Art Association of Australia New Zealand wrote to The Hon Paul Fletcher MP, Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety, and the Arts outlining their concerns with the proposed decision to cut staff by 10% at the National Gallery of Australia and what the ramifications would be with such a decision on the sector. Dear Minister, The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ), the peak professional body representing art historians, artists, and art curators in Australasia and the Pacific, objects strongly to the decision to cut 10% of staff at the […]

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Joanna Mendelssohn | Staff cuts will hurt the National Gallery of Australia, but it’s not spending less on art. It’s just spending it differently

Advocacy, News

Staff cuts will hurt the National Gallery of Australia, but it’s not spending less on art. It’s just spending it differently Thennicke/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Joanna Mendelssohn, University of Melbourne On September 10 1965, Sir Robert Menzies commissioned the National Art Gallery Committee of Inquiry to consider the establishment of a national gallery for Australia. The resulting Lindsay Report, published in 1966, is an ambitious document, describing an art gallery to serve the nation through the quality and range of its collections and exhibitions. It emphasised the need to have an all encompassing collection of Australian art. The report recognised, […]

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ADVOCACY | ARTS DAY ON THE HILL | NAVA

Advocacy

Every Wednesday evening from 22 April, NAVA will join Australia’s leading advocacy thinkers and practitioners online at 4pm (AEST). Let’s talk arts, policy, media, political and public engagement. What works? What doesn’t? What can we achieve together? Results from the online workshops will culminate in Arts Day on the Hill – Australia’s national day of advocacy for the arts. This year’s Arts Day on the Hill is Wednesday, 12 August, during the first Parliamentary sitting week after the winter break. Last year’s Arts Day on the Hill training was an intensive two-day set of workshops presented at the National Gallery of […]

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News | NAVA COVID-19 Ceative Industry Letter to Government

Advocacy, News

On Thursday, 26 March, Esther Anatolitis, Exectuive Director, National Association for the Visual Arts organised more than fifty orgs to come together to write to the Prime Minister, key frontbenchers, the Opposition, the state ministers, and the lord mayors, outlining urgent action needed for the industry: Letter to Federal and State Ministers Please see the media release Creative Industry Unites Esther acknowledges the important collaboration between Australia’s self-directed First Nations arts orgs who authored the paragraph on First Peoples impacts and extends thanks to Merindah Donnelly and colleagues. What’s next? Please share if you’re on social media with #DontCancelCreativity Please […]

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Statement on Christchurch Massacre

Advocacy, Events, General

The AAANZ expresses its complete and utter abhorrence towards the events of March 15, 2019 in Christchurch which saw 50 people murdered and a similar number wounded. As an organisation dedicated to fostering understanding about the art and visual culture of the widest possible range of cultures, peoples, and histories, the Association is fundamentally opposed to the racist and hate-filled ideologies which gave rise to this attack on the Muslim community. On behalf of all members of the Association, in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, I would like to offer my heartfelt condolences to those colleagues, friends, and families who […]

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ARC Discovery Projects and the National Interest Test

Advocacy, General, News

Congratulations to the following colleagues working in the Research Fields of Art History, Theory and Criticism who were successful in the latest round of ARC applications:   Anne Dunlop Discovery Project The University of Melbourne This project aims to bring European and Chinese art history into dialogue. It explores the early Italian Renaissance in the larger geopolitical context of Mongol Eurasia and the Yuan Empire, to address the questions of influence, contact, and exchange. In reframing the development of early European art as a fundamentally cross-cultural phenomenon, this project aims to offer a better understanding of the roots of our […]

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Update: The Australian Government’s Attack on the Humanities

Advocacy

The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) this week condemned the actions of the former Minister of Education and Training, Simon Birmingham, who in 2017 reversed several research funding decisions made by the Australian Research Council (ARC). Many of the scholarly projects arbitrarily refused funding were in art history, visual culture, and related fields; all were in the humanities. This shameful interference in the rigorous peer-review process of Australia’s most significant humanities funding body shows that the current government has no respect for the important work that our members and subscribers do, whether as humanities researchers, as grant […]

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AAANZ statement on the interference in the ARC peer review process

Advocacy

Statement from  president Anthony White on behalf of the AAANZ: The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) condemns in the strongest terms the actions of the former Minister of Education of Training, Simon Birmingham, who in 2017 arbitrarily reversed several grant awarding decisions made by the Australian Research Council (ARC). As has been recently reported in Senate Estimates and in the media, the then Minister intervened in the grant awarding process by going against the expertise and decision-making of the ARC and disallowed a number of grants in the humanities, several of which were in the field of […]

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