Do art competitions embody the essence of art, with artists vying for opportunities and endorsement, fame and fortune, relevance and recognition? Or is art, instead, a landscape of communal enquiry, collective creativity, and care? Can we have it both ways? Is there a sweet spot? What does success look like? What should it look like?
Join our local panel: Elena Dias-Jayasinha (Associate Curator, Museum of Brisbane—and curator, the churchie emerging art prize 2022), Natalya Hughes (artist and Senior Lecturer, Queensland College of the Arts, Griffith University—and winner of the 2020 Sunshine Coast Art Award), Andrew McNamara (art historian and Emeritus Professor, Queensland University of Technology), and Ryan Renshaw (gallerist).
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Elena Dias-Jayasinha is a Sri Lankan–Australian curator and art historian. She is Associate Curator at the Museum of Brisbane. She studied Art History and Japanese at the University of Queensland and was the 2020 recipient of the Paula and Tony Kinnane Art History Scholarship. Her past curatorial projects include the churchie emerging art prize 2022 (Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2022) and Music of Spheres (University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2020).
Natalya Hughes is a Brisbane-based artist who explores decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the body, and excess. She won the Sunshine Coast Art Prize in 2020, and was a finalist in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2023, 2022, and 2018. Her work has been included in shows at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and Tarrawarra Museum of Art. She is the Honours Program Director, Visual Arts, at Queensland College of Art, Brisbane. She is represented by Milani Gallery in Brisbane and Sullivan+Strumpf, in Sydney.
Andrew McNamara is an art historian and Emeritus Professor, Visual Arts, at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. His recent publications include Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design, and Architecture (2019), Undesign (2018), and Surpassing Modernity: Ambivalence in Art, Politics, and Society (2018).
Ryan Renshaw and Danielle Renshaw run the Brisbane gallery, The Renshaws.