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

News

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

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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

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Berlin trip: Connected Audiences Conference and some Art, Art, Art....

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Writing the grant acquittals for my Berlin conference has been a valuable opportunity (and a useful deadline) to really sit down and make concrete what I learned and gained from the opportunity to attend and present at the Connected Audiences Conference back in May. There’s been some immediate benefits - new contacts and conversations underway with colleagues in the US and UK - and so many new examples of best practice youth engagement within a museum and evaluation context. I’ve written more about the conference here but honestly, the thing that really makes these kinds of trips so special is the opportunity to experience some phenomenal exhibitions that, by virtue of geography and ambition, you just don’t get to see everyday in Australia. Some of the absolute standouts?

Alfredo Jaar: The End of the World at KINDL - Centre for Contemporary Art. An audacious use of scale and architecture to highlight the insidious relationship between ‘critical minerals’, climate change and colonialism.

Cyprien Gaillard’s Retinal Rivalry at Sprüth Magers. A dizzying, dazzling, occasionally visceral stereoscopic film installation that traverses layers of German history, social spaces, urban landscapes and the squalid interiors of a glass recycling bin...

Mark Bradford. Keep Walking at the Hamburger Bahnhof - political, poetic, vulnerable and wondrously tactile (his video work Deimos, 2015 was just one highlight) - as well as the group exhibition Museum is Motion with works by Elmgreen & Dragset and Jeremy Shaw, whose audacious multi-screen installation Phase Shifting Index just blew me away.

Fujiko Nakaya’s latest site-specific fog installation, Cult of Mist at the Neue Nationalgalerie - the full bodied, physiological sense of delight-as-fog that literally envelopes you is something I’ll remember for a long time.

Neue Nationalgalerie was also where we also encountered and got completely obsessed with artist Sarah Wenzinger’s Mediation Ex Machina. A loose parts machine with cranks and wheels that offers a lottery of postcard prompts for critical and curious looking through the gallery. It was so sophisticated, so playful, the prompts were * chefs kiss * - singular, thoughtful, specific, accessible for anyone (not least because they were bi-lingual.) That encounter alone made the trip to Berlin worthwhile.

Other highlights included Janet Laurence: The Burnt Sea at Alfred Ehrhardt Siftung, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at Gropius Bau, Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds at the ifa Gallery Berlin, Olafur Eliasson: the lure of looking through a polarised window of opportunities at neugerriemschneider and It's Just a Matter of Time at the Palais Populaire, with a group show drawn from the Deutsche Bank collection including works by Julian Irlinger, Heidi Bucher and Shilpa Gupta.

And then there’s just Berlin itself - the architecture, the surface level history, the graffiti and street art, the small wine bars and green parks. This trip would have been a lot more stringent and stressful without the space to really be present and opportunistic in the best, most creative, most professional way so I’m really grateful, again to Create NSW and Creative Australia for the support to undertake this trip.

OTHER POSTS

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Connected Audiences Conference - Culture & Young People: What could possibly go wrong?

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I’m heading to Berlin next month to co-present a paper and deliver a workshop with my former MCA Australia colleague Yaël Filipovic at the biennial Connected Audiences Conference.

Convened by the Institute for Cultural Research Participation in Berlin and the American Institute for Learning Innovation, in 2025 the conference has the brilliantly apt provocation: “Culture and Young People: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Factors, Challenges and Opportunities of Cultural Participation for Youth”

Yaël and I will be sharing our experiences with youth-led programming in Australia; the importance of institutional support; and how we have taken our learnings forward in our respective careers.

I’m really excited for the opportunities to connect with and learn from peers internationally, to test and develop my own skills and ideas in relation to institutional practice and working with young people.

I’m very grateful to have received funding from Creative Australia to undertake this professional development opportunity and excited to share my learnings on my return.

UPDATE (30 May 2025): My participation at the conference has received additional support, with a Professional Development Grant from the NSW Government through Create NSW. This funding kind of funding is so invaluable for independent creatives and I’m incredibly grateful to have the support to undertake this work, to build networks and share learnings with international colleagues.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

 

This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

OTHER POSTS

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Art Guide Australia: Home Truths - feature story

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Illustrations by Caitlin Aloisio Shearer for Art Guide Australia.

My first feature for Art Guide Australia was published in the Jan/Feb issue of the magazine. I’ve always really loved this magazine so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to write for them.

Looking at the implications of the ongoing housing crisis for artists and creatives (an essay commissioned the same week my rent went up again), I spoke with artists Sarah Poulgrain, Keg de Souza, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro and curator and writer and Pari co-director Tian Zhang.

I also looked at this staggering (and largely, staggeringly depressing) major economic study, Artists as Workers, written by David Throsby and Katya Petetskaya and commissioned by Creative Australia. Discoveries like the fact that the gross creative income for a visual artist in Australia in 2021-2022—$22,500—has remained unchanged since 1986 were pretty demoralising but talking to creatives like Sarah and Tian, whose practices are working to reimagine ideas of community and collectivisation, I was reminded again of how important artists and creativity is to everyone’s wellbeing. Now we just need to fund it…

But the article is now online, so you can read it here.

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.