The Cross Art Projects Curators

	Elizabeth Ashburn Ace Bourke Alissar Chidiac	Christopher Dean Peter Fay Merryn Gates	Jo Holder Craig Judd Robert Lake	Rudi Vos Ruark Lewis

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ELIZABETH ASHBURN Elizabeth Ashburn is an artist and teacher who also writes and curates on art and politics. Her projects include Vivienne Dadour: Invisible Realm (The Cross Art Projects, 15 September–9 October 2004) and Parthenogenesis (with Gary Carsley at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 2003. Her book, Lesbian Art: An Encounter with Power, was published in 1996. Her current artwork, in the form of miniatures critiquing the invasion of Iraq, will be shown at The Cross Art Projects in 2005. Elizabeth Ashburn is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Newcastle. Contact: e. ashburn@unsw.edu.au ANTHONY (ACE) BOURKE ACE BOURKE is one of the curators who pioneered the contextualizing of Aboriginal art in a contemporary urban context. In 1980 he was the inaugural Aboriginal art curator at Crafts Council of Australia Gallery then exhibition co-ordinator for Aboriginal Arts Australia (1984-1989) and co-director of Hogarth Galleries Aboriginal Art Centre (1990-1999). His international exhibitions include Art & Aboriginality for the Portsmouth Arts Festival United Kingdom (1987), followed by Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Australia, Glasgow Museum (1990) and the collaborative projects between Indigenous Australian and Indian artists on behalf of the Australian and Indian Governments shown as —The Art of the Western Desert (1987) and co-ordinator Gapu Miny’tji Aboriginal Cultural Exchange and Exhibition, National Handicrafts Museum, New Delhi (1999). His exhibition Flesh & Blood: A Story of Sydney 1788-1998, for the Museum of Sydney, was acclaimed as one of the first personal colonial exhibitions and the first combining colonial and Aboriginal narratives. His exhibition Eora: Mapping Indigenous Sydney 1770-1850, co-curated with Keith Vincent Smith, (June 2006 at the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW) was conceived as a reply exhibition. He works from Sydney as an independent curator and Aboriginal Art Consultant for Schapiro Auctioneers. Contact: acebourke@yahoo.com ALISSAR CHIDIAC Alissar Chidiac has been involved in community and cultural development work for over 20 years. Her focus, since the early 1990s, is on Arab Australian culture, in theatre, cultural heritage and contemporary culture. She is co-curator, Beirut to Baghdad: Communities, Collecting and Culture, Powerhouse Museum, 2003-04. She is currently Arts Officer with Auburn Community Development Network Contact: alissar_chidiac@yahoo.com.au or auburnarts@acdn.org.au CHRISTOPHER DEAN Projects by Christopher Dean discuss issues in contemporary art with an emphasis on the historical and theoretical debates surrounding abstraction. Several exhibitions have innovatively replayed aspects of Australian abstraction: Central Street Live (Penrith Regional Gallery, 2001), The Secret Paintings of Vernon Treweeke (Penrith, 2003) and current project Frozen Gestures, The Art and Philosophy of Peter Upward (Penrith, 2005). Conceptual Crochet, at The Cross Art Projects (2004) brought together work by eleven diverse artists trained in the Conceptual Art tradition in order to embrace formal or aesthetic concerns. Christopher Dean has been exhibiting regularly since 1988 in over twenty artist run spaces throughout Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, USA and UK. He has exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW, the Museum of Contemporary Art and The National Gallery, Canberra. He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship and the Australia Council's Los Angeles Studio. He also lectures and writes widely in art history and theory. He was born in Sydney in 1963 and is researching a doctorate at College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Contact: cooktowndesoto@yahoo.com.au PETER FAY I have a strong belief in rattling the cage. I want to get people asking – Why is that here? Why is that art and not that? ‘Outsider’ artists have as much to give as established or ‘Insider’ artists. Peter Fay in conversation May 2003 Peter Fay, artist, collector and curator, seeks to overcome distinctions between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. Home Sweet Home: Works from the Peter Fay Collection at the National Gallery of Australia (co-curated by Deborah Hart, senior curator of Australian Painting and Sculpture at the NGA, and Glenn Barkley, curator, University of Wollongong), 1994 and touring 1995, showed Peter Fay’s unique collection of predominantly Australian and New Zealand contemporary art. Contact: pkf@idx.com.au MERRYN GATES Merryn Gates is known for her thoughtful and meticulous analysis of contemporary artists. She is the inaugural artistic director of hunter art.1, a unique cultural festival linking five regional galleries as well as site-specific works. Gates has directed Canberra School of Art Gallery and curated many exhibitions for Melbourne University and Monash University Art Galleries. A stunning retrospective selection of Vivienne Binns’ work at Canberra Contemporary Artspace was entitled, SHIT, a pun on jazz ‘scatting’ and the improvisation between artist and curator and the artist’s fondness for scatological humour. Her national touring retrospective of Binns work initiated by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and University of Tasmania, begins in 2006. Contact: merryn@netspeed.com.au web: www.merryngates.com JO HOLDER Jo Holder is the director of The Cross Art Projects in Sydney. Her curatorial projects are known for a pluralistic presentation about our cultural past and present. Recent projects include On Neon (2004) and Comrades up the Cross: Len Fox (1905–2004), George Molnar’s Sydney (City Exhibition Space, 2001) and Proud Arch (building the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Bridge Pylon, 2002 with Gavin Harris). She was director of SH Ervin Gallery, National Trust, Sydney (1997–1999) and co-director, Mori Gallery, Sydney (1984–92). She is co-author of Human Scale in Architecture. George Molnar’s Sydney (Thames and Hudson, 2003) and co-editor with Joan Kerr of Past Present an anthology on the National Women’s Art Project (Art and Australia Books, 1997) and she co-ordinated the National Women's Art Exhibition comprising simultaneous exhibitions in over 147 galleries, museums and libraries in 1995. She edited Photofile (Australian Centre for Photography, 1994–1996) and writes and edits for contemporary art journals with an interest in contemporary biennales. CRAIG JUDD Craig Judd is a curator, art historian, educator and artist. He co-ordinated dynamic programs of performances, screenings, artists' talks, and webcasts for the Biennale of Sydney. In addition he has produced a number of education resources documenting the past three Biennale of Sydney exhibitions (2004, 2002 and 2000). Also a curator, his art historical exhibitions Wild Thang: Post Pop from the MCA, People and Destiny: George Lambert and Federation have toured New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland regional galleries. He was also the coordinating curator of The Arts of Islam: Treasures from Kuwait at Art Gallery of New South Wales, (November 2002 –January 2003) as well as co-curator (with Amanda Lawson) for The Gold Project, Bathurst Regional Gallery, 2001. Craid Judd writes and lectures extensively on contemporary art. In 2007 he is co-curating (with Jo Holder), an exhibition on the influence of the late Joan Kerr’s revolutionary work on Australian art history and her input into post-colonial and regional heritage debates. From mid-2005 he is chief curator at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. Contact: publicprograms@biennaleofsydney.com.au ROBERT LAKE Robert Lake is an independent curator and DJ with a specialist interest in Sydney Queer art history and contemporary indigenous art. Robert Lake’s gay art archive project began over three years ago with the show Ante at Imperial Slacks. He followed with Dead Gay Artists at Sydney University’s Tin Sheds in 2002, Pristine Latrine (a happening in Taylor Square toilets) and, a year later, Hung Drawn and Quartered, a huge survey of three generations of queer artists also at the Sheds. It All Started At Patchs at The Cross Art Projects (2004) is one in this series of important exhibitions. Nightclubs were one of the first gay scenes to bridge underground and mainstream cultures. The artists in the exhibition, Lance Cunynhame, T. Charles Green (Theraza Green) and Bill Morley were variously DJs, lighting designers and performers at the legendary Patchs. This experiment is now compared to London’s Taboo club which showcased artists like Leigh Bowery. Just for a change, his exhibition Seven Beauties (Tin Sheds, 2005) brought together seven women instrumental in Sydney’s alternative and experimental art world. He is working with Lance Cunynhame on an exhibition for The Cross Art Projects in 2006 and on a book on three decades of Sydney gay artists. RUDI VOS Vos worked as a freelance curator in The Netherlands from 1972 and regularly contributed to exhibitions in Australia since 1998. Vos has been involved in artist collectives in Sydney and Wollongong. His curatorial works focus on performance artist Joop Buis, romantic painter Juan Den Pourg and painter Jelle van den Berg. Vos’s paintings, representing the effects of sunlight on irregular surfaces, sometimes have been carelessly associated with concrete art. He is an adjunct curator at the School of Creative Arts University of Wollongong. Contact c/-: Jelle van den Berg, jelle_vandenberg@uow.edu.au RUARK LEWIS Ruark Lewis has had a successful two-decade career as an artist, performance artist, curator and writer who operates across a range of disciplines. His work is featured in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney entitled 'Zones of Transition'. He founded Haiku Review web-art journal.