Writings, News
Jo Higgins
Routledge publication: Youth Programs in Art ...
Routledge publication: Youth Programs in Art Museums - An International Perspective
Writings
Jo Higgins
Art Guide Australia: Field Notes. A Grassroots ...
Art Guide Australia: Field Notes. A Grassroots Approach to Public Art
Events, Review, News
Jo Higgins
Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and ...
Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and some Art, Art, Art....
Writings, News
Jo Higgins
Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story
Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story
News, Writings
Jo Higgins
Artlink magazine's 'Hyphen' issue published
Artlink magazine's 'Hyphen' issue published

NAVA Educator Guide: Introduction to Committing to Meaningful First Nations Projects in Education Settings

This was a small but really meaningful project I had the privilege to contribute to at the end of last year. I was asked to edit a new education guide for the National Association for the Visual Arts, written and illustrated by the brilliant Dr Emma Hicks in consultation with Dr Christine Evans.

As NAVA says, “The guide offers easy-to-follow processes, protocols and good practices for engaging Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander artists when working with students in visual art-making activities and programs.”

You can read more about the guide and download it for free here.

OTHER POSTS

Art Guide Australia: The Beguiling Art of the Boyd Women

I will take any opportunity to write about Bundanon. It’s so truly a place for artists and the work and exhibitions it generates is so profoundly connected to that place, materially, creatively and intellectually.

It was a joy to visit and write about their current exhibition The Hidden Line: The Art of the Boyd Women for Art Guide Australia. You can read my feature online here.

OTHER POSTS

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Routledge publication: Youth Programs in Art Museums - An International Perspective

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The long tail of my 2018 Churchill Fellowship continues to unfurl in both learnings and opportunities.

18 months ago I was approached by the editors of a then-forthcoming Routledge publication gathering international perspectives on youth programs in art museums. They were looking for an Australian contributor and the always generous Betsy Gibbons at ICA Boston, who I had the immense privilege to meet and learn from during my Fellowship, sent them in my direction. And now, it's out in the world.

My contribution, "Where to From Here? Reflections on Future-Proofing People, Programs, and Museums" picks up on many of the same threads I had started to pull in my essay "The Museum as a Cowboy Place" for Artlink magazine’s Hyphen issue last Summer, expertly edited by Ava Lacoon, Claire Osborn-Li and Hen Vaughan.

It reiterates the learnings and provocations I (hope I) offered at the Connected Audiences Conference in Berlin in May with the brilliant Yael Filipovic. It's a reflection on the last nearly 10 years of work, research, care and collaboration - as well as some of the programs I've had the privilege to steer, including the gone-but-not-forgotten MCA GENEXT at MCA Australia and the also-now-gone-but-also-not-forgotten National Young Writers Program at the National Gallery of Australia.

It's probably a more hopeful essay than I actually feel right now but looking at the book's contents page - noting so many experts and champions (including quite a few others I also got to meet back in 2019, thanks to my Churchill) - I feel really proud of this body of work and grateful to have had the opportunity to make the case (again) for the importance of youth arts programming in and for museums, as well as for young people, now and into the future.

Also, I love that the photo I snapped in a hurry during an especially chaotic GENEXT 'fridge poetry x music lyric mashup' workshop inspired by the art of Jenny Watson back in 2018, that I included as my essay's illustration, inspired the title of co-editor Susan McCullough's introduction.

What we had together was indeed gorgeous.

OTHER POSTS

Art Guide Australia: Field Notes. A Grassroots Approach to Public Art

These are my favourite kinds of stories to tell. Artists and creatives re-thinking ideas of community, public space, ways of doing. Artists who are equal parts curious, ambitious and gentle. Artists who believe that art and culture and creativity can be tools for wellbeing, community building and lasting change.

I loved the expansive conversations I had with Heidi and Hugo in the writing of this piece and I’m really grateful to Art Guide Australia for commissioning it. You can read it online here. In many ways it feels like a book-end to the piece I wrote for their Jan-Feb issue on the impact of the housing crisis on artists and creatives, so I appreciate that long lens take on an issue too.

And you can read more about MAPA and the Open Field Agency here, too.

OTHER POSTS

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Olafur Eliasson: PRESENCE, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

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I’m so grateful to QAGOMA for the opportunity to attend the opening weekend of Olafur Eliasson’s new exhibition, PRESENCE, in Brisbane last week.

I got to meet Olafur and interview him in Berlin back in May for a feature for Art Guide Australia’s Nov-Dec issue (out now) and it was a true, true career highlight. An expansive, freewheeling conversation that covered art, politics, care, institutions, climate catastrophes, uncertainty, collaboration and curiosity.

His studio is a four-storey former brewery in Prenzlauer Berg with different departments, studios, labs, libraries and kitchens. You absolutely get a sense of the scale of his thinking and his ambition. Fast-forward to now and to get to experience the exhibition conceived and curated with such relentless tenderness by Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, is such a joy.

It’s full of invitations to wonder, to slow down, to be surprised and confused, to feel dis/embodied and unsteady and still. I think what I appreciate in the gentle spectacle of his work is that it’s not only an invitation for viewers to renegotiate their own understandings of space/place/time/light, it’s also a model for museums to re-think their positioning or understanding of museum visitors and how we could better invite our audiences to negotiate their own meaning of the work/world at hand.

Olafur Eliasson: PRESENCE

QAGOMA

Until 12 July 2026

OTHER POSTS

I live and work on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people and acknowledge their unbroken connection to this Country. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present, because this always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.