Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 19 March
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Across March we’ll be Reading the City; shining a light on the many ways we understand and talk about Melbourne itself. From the city as an abstract concept to the physical landscape in all its permutations, we’ll be hearing from visual artists and architects, policy makers and designers, novelists and historians. The City of Literature becomes the focus, and you’ll never read it the same way again.
Art in the City
Chris McAuliffe and a panel of experts, including Christine Dew, Tom Nicholson and Marcus Westbury explore public art in Melbourne.
From the vibrant graffiti scene to statues of Victoria’s Victorian governors to everything in between, what place is there for art in the city?
Featuring
Marcus Westbury
Marcus Westbury is the inaugural CEO of Contemporary Arts Precincts Ltd that is leading the development of the Collingwood Arts Precinct in Melbourne. He is also the founder of the multi award-winning Renew Newcastle and Renew Australia projects that have reopened more than a hundred vacant properties to creative and community uses across Australia.
Marcus has been a writer, media maker, festival director and the founder and manager of multiple arts events, community projects and social enterprises across Australia. He is the author of Creating Cities (Niche Press, 2015) and has been the writer and presenter of the ABC TV series Bespoke and Not Quite Art.
Chris McAuliffe
Dr Chris McAuliffe is Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at The University of Melbourne. Prior to that he was for ten years a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Dr McAuliffe has researched and written extensively in the area of contemporary art, and is the author of Art and Suburbia, 1996, Linda Marrinon: let her try, 2007, and Jon Cattapan: possible histories, 2008.
He is a regular media commentator on the arts and currently appears on ABC TV’s ‘Sunday Arts’ programme.
A graduate of the University of Melbourne and of Harvard University, Dr McAuliffe is currently researching the interaction of art and popular music.
Tom Nicholson
Tom Nicholson is a Melbourne-based artist and He is part of the upcoming Auckland Triennial, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon.
He was included in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, as well as group shows such as Animism, at Extra City and MUHKA, Antwerp; Since we last spoke about monuments, at Stroom Den Haag in 2008; System Error at Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena in 2007; Transversa at Galeria Metropolitana in Santiago, Chile in 2006.
His collaboration with the New York-based composer Andrew Byrne was most recently performed in Venice in 2009 by the Italian contemporary music ensemble L’Arsenale.
He is a Lecturer in Drawing in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University.
Christine Dew
Dr Christine Dew is a writer, photographer and community cultural development worker, formerly a senior lecturer in the history programme at La Trobe University.
She is the author of Uncommissioned Art: An A-Z of Australian Graffiti (Melbourne University Publishing, 2007) the first Australia-wide study of graffiti, which is now in its third print run.
She is currently working to document stories with Indigenous elders on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) for the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum and with retrenched Pacific Brands workers in Brisbane’s West End.