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QUT Vice-Chancellor Margaret Sheil has marked International Women’s Day with a special event hosted by Dame Quentin Bryce AM at the QUT Art Museum to showcase Australian women artists overdue for recognition of their contribution to the cultural landscape.
“This year the United Nations’ priority theme for International Women’s Day is ‘Cracking the Code’, which highlights the role bold, transformative ideas, inclusive technologies, and accessible education can play in combatting discrimination and the marginalisation of women globally,” Professor Sheil said.
“As a university, QUT aspires to achieve equity throughout our activities.
“Our art collection is no exception – works by women comprise only a small share of major permanent collections around the world and QUT is committed to playing its part in redressing this gender imbalance through our collection policies, acquisition, copyright, and exhibitions.”
Two exhibitions opening this week at the QUT Art Museum - Spowers & Syme and A Matter of Looking: 20th Century works from the QUT Art Collection – shine a spotlight on a number of Australian women artists from the past and present.
Gallery director and curator, Vanessa Van Ooyen, said Spowers & Syme was a National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition that is part the Know My Name series, which showcases women artists from 1900 to the present.
“Curated by Dr Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, curator of Australian Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Australia, Spowers & Syme is a major coup for the QUT Art Museum,” Ms Van Ooyen said.
“It celebrates the artistic friendship of two pioneering Modernist women artists, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, whose innovative works captured the spirit of the interwar years in 1930s/1940s Australia.
“Each from Melbourne and each the daughters of rival newspaper owners, they studied together in Paris and later with avant-garde printmaker Claude Flight in London, before returning home to boldly blaze a trail and influence the course of a modern art in Australia, which, at the time, was pretty conservative.
“Spowers & Syme showcases their dynamic approach through prints and drawings whose rhythmic patterns reflect the fast pace of the modern world through everyday observations of childhood themes, overseas travel, and urban life.”
Ms Van Ooyen said A Matter of Looking: 20th Century works from the QUT Art Collection was a perfect complement to the touring exhibition and celebrated similar themes of strong women artists, with rarely seen paintings, prints and drawings selected from the QUT Art Collection of almost 3000 works.
“A Matter of Looking includes works created across the 20th Century. Art is not only about looking visually, but truly seeing with the mind’s eye and this exhibition celebrates the role of the audience to bring into being an artist’s work, ideas and imagination,” Ms Van Ooyen said.
“A Matter of Looking encourages the viewer to immerse themselves in the simple act of looking and discover some extraordinary art produced by Australian women artists of the last century, including familiar and unfamiliar names – Ann Wallace, Ann Thomson, Joy Roggenkamp, Judy Watson, Gwendolyn Grant, Winifred Towers, Treahna Hamm, Barbara Hanrahan and Jessie Traill, to name just a handful.”
Both exhibitions run from 10 March 2023 - 4 June 2023. The QUT Art Museum is open 10AM-4PM Tuesday to Friday and 10AM-2PM Sunday.
- Spowers & Syme is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition supported by Visions of Australia, Major Patron David Thomas AM, and the Gordon Darling Foundation.
Main image: Shannon Fentiman, Qld Attorney-General, Minister for Justice, Minister for Women and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, QUT Vice-Chancellor Margaret Sheil, and Dame Quentin Bryce AM at QUT Art Museum for International Women's Day. Photo: Anthony Weate
Media contact:
Amanda Weaver, QUT Media, 07 3138 3151, amanda.weaver@qut.edu.au
After hours: 0407 585 901, media@qut.edu.au