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

professional development

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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

NGA National Young Writers Digital Residency launches

The National Young Writers Program at the NGA has just launched its 2024 digital residency for 16 early career arts writers and creatives.

It’s been a really productive last 12 months reflecting on the pilot mentorship program and taking those learnings forward to deepen and extend the program offering.

The residency will introduce participants to a range of critical writing practices and ideas through the Gallery’s exhibition program, with each session co-curated by invited guest editors and writers.

Participants will have opportunities to respond to regular writing prompts, with feedback and mentoring, as well as paid writing commissions for the Gallery’s website.

I’m incredibly excited too, that Artlink magazine is joining us as Publishing Partner this year with some incredible opportunities for program alumni to come later this year.

Guest writers, editors and artists include Art Guide Australia editor Tiarney Miekus; arts writer, curator and Memo Review editor Amelia Winata; arts writer Tom Melick; writer, poet and researcher Charmaine Papertalk Green; and artist Lindy Lee.

You can read more about the Residency on the National Gallery of Australia here.

OTHER POSTS

Teen Program Symposium: Walker Art Center

Last month I was lucky enough to travel to Minneapolis to attend the Museum Teen Programs Symposium and launch of the Walker Art Center’s Teen Programs How-To Kit, that I was a contributor for.

This professional development opportunity was made possible with support from Create NSW through a quick response grant (the recognition of the value of these kinds of opportunities for individuals is honestly huge.)

SYMPOSIUM OPENING NIGHT:

The first night at the Walker featured an energising, provocative, brilliant in conversation that was moderated by the Walker’s Youth Programs Manager Simona Zappas. We heard from cultural anthropologist and learning scientist Dr Mimi Ito, Professor Julio Cammarato from the University of Arizona, whose research focuses on participatory action research with Latinx students; and Stephen Kwok, the curator of public engagement at Dia Art Foundation in New York.

They reflected on their own practices and questions including:

  • How can staff working with teens in out-of-school settings respond to the complex needs of youth with empowering programming?

  • What does this look like in institutions with colonial histories?

They were all very clear that they were speaking in their capacities as researchers, academics, museum workers and educators and not FOR young people. This assertion and clarity around ideas of authorship, co-creation, agency and transparency were a recurring conversation point across the whole weekend.

Some of the many, many things I took away from their reflections and insights included:

  • The idea of cultivating not just young creatives by civic participants

  • The importance of opacity and the right not to be understood (in direct contrast to the expectation of transparency)

  • Ideas of connected learning that centre young people’s ideas, community and cultural wealth

  • Recognising ‘funds of knowledge’ and assets within communities, including cultural practices which can challege existing or dominant ways of doing or understanding

  • The importance of ‘creative resistance’ in visioning and dreaming of a new future in the face of current systems of oppression

  • The idea of creating environments, not programs (or pipelines) with different spaces for different exchanges and space to take risks

  • The importance of young people being able to bring their whole selves to space (which can mean free time, snacks, intergenerational friendships - the HOMAGO model of hanging out, messing around, geeking out)

  • Using the poetics of longer-term looking at art: the importance of slowing down, encouraging longer and more sustained engagement and re-looking

  • The idea of relational infrastructure and the flow or exchange of power: what does it look like for power to be expressed through a youth program?

  • Acknowledging that power does not flow equitably between young people and museums but what do we dismiss as interruption or distraction within a program or space that is actually an expression of power?

  • The power of young people and youth participatory research - the importance of that critical perception and different perceptions (itself another form of power)

  • That adults are usually the problem, not the young people…

  • The ways mobile phones and technology have revolutionised young people’s power, with their communication not as surveilled - that as other public spaces for communing are closed off to them, gaming, texting, social media are alternate spaces for gathering

  • The idea of the educator as translator

  • Building shared purpose is key to changing structures

  • The value of space, unknowing, opacity and not having to constantly prove or demonstrate impact

  • The importance of the question (for programs, institutions, young people) - working towards understanding, solutions, transformation

  • The fact that adults need to be educated before you engage young people!

WORKSHOPS & SITE VISITS:

On the Saturday, we spent the day interrogating ideas of invisible power and the role and impact of group dynamics through a workshop facilitated by Stephen Kwok.

It was fascinating to really observe how even simple changes to a space through things like lighting and furniture rearrangement could radically change the group dynamics and the embodied experience of being in these spaces - safe, exposed, invisible, comfortable, playful.

In the afternoon we went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art to see the extraordinary exhibition, In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now

And then on the Sunday, we all hopped on an iconic yellow school bus for a series of visits to Spark'd Studios, Juxtaposition Arts, and the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network.

These site visits and conversations brought back so many memories of my Churchill Fellowship experience but it was so valuable to do them this time as part of a group of educators from across North America.

This professional development opportunity was supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.

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.