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

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

Art Guide Australia: Material curiosities, MCA Primavera

My feature on MCA Australia’s 34th iteration of their annual Primavera exhibition has just been published by Art Guide. I truly loved having the opportunity to speak with artists Keemon Williams and Frances Carmody in the writing of this piece.

You can read it online here.

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

Art Guide Australia: Studio profile of Monica Rani Rudhar

Photo: Hamish Ta-mé for Art Guide Australia.

Studio visits with artists are one of my most favourite things to do. These places of creativity, experimentation, vulnerability, possibility, materiality and sometimes mess are their own form of self-portrait and the chance to visit Monica Rani Rudhar at Parramatta Artists Studio for a profile for Art Guide recently was a true highlight.

You can read it here.

And Monica’s show, Just Like the Real Thing is on at Martin Browne Contemporary until 19 July.

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.