About

The Cross Art Projects is a not-for-profit curatorial initiative founded by Jo Holder in September 2003 and run by a small group of independent curators. In late 2009 we moved to 8 Llankelly Place after working at 33 Roslyn Street in Kings Cross in tandem with The Cross Books. The old space continues as a curator run-space with changing formats every two years. (Formerly The Drawing Room now Affiliated Text).

Manifesto: The Cross Art Projects foregrounds contemporary work that reflects the multiple relationships between art and life, art and the public sphere and explores the boundaries of this context. We are attentive to the local without sacrificing the scope of an international view. The Cross Art Projects presents curated exhibitions and work by artists who create critical projects that question and/or reflect our present circumstances and whose work has a rigorous conceptual foundation. Projects are enhanced with conversations and round-tables by local activist, architectural and heritage groups.

We acknowledge and respect all Traditional Owners & Custodians on whose Lands we live, work and travel through, in Australia and overseas.

Curators

Jo Holder, Director

Jo Holder founded The Cross Art Projects in Sydney’s Kings Cross district in 2003 to progress equity and social justice issues in contemporary art. The publication Connectedness1 (2021) sets out three themes over this time: Voice, Treaty and Truth-telling, Climate and Mining and Archipelagos. The archipelagos concept includes regional exchange projects Dhomola Dhawu, Makassar/Milingimbi (2021) and Elastic: Darwin<>Sydney<>Dili (2014, NCCA Darwin and Sydney). Mining and climate projects include the RISE series and a series on Macarthur River Mine (NT), a series on the transnational nature of mining. Other themes are Contemporary Art and Feminism (Jo Holder with Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore) and Future Feminist Archive (regional NSW, 2015–16 with Jasmin Stephens) and Archive Live! at Wollongong City Gallery (2019 with Catriona Moore) and a series called ‘Peacework’: Peace in Pieces and I am a woman for peace (both Sydney Trades Hall, 2025 with Neale Towart), on Australian women’s protests for peace during the Cold War and Forms of Censorship on the history of Australian artworld self-censorship about the “Question of Palestine” (The Cross Art Projects, 2024 with Alissar Chidiac and Karen Vesk). Other projects include Witnessing the Intervention, a series monitoring the disasters of the Federal Intervention into Indigenous communities (co-curated with Djon Mundine) and on the impact of Jack Mundey and the influential Green Bans Movement on environmental legislation: Power to the People (2022), Re/construction (with Sydney Trades Hall, 2020) and Green Bans Art Walk (with Performance Space and Big Fag Press, 2011). Jo Holder has held key curatorial roles in the public and independent visual art sectors as director S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney and published several books on contemporary visual art and culture.

Contact Jo Holder, 0406 537 933, info@crossart.com.au

Djon Mundine OAM, Curator in residence

Djon Mundine OAM is Bandjalung man and cultural leader and a foundational figure in the development, exhibition and understanding of contemporary Aboriginal art. Windows and Mirrors (2025), is a collection of his writings dating from 1999 to 2023, alongside archival images and exhibition documentation, that traces key figures, exhibitions and movements in the development of contemporary Aboriginal art. Most have been curated by Mundine in spaces ranging from Lismore Regional Gallery in New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney to Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. His exhibitions range from the ground-breaking 2008 show Ngadhu, Ngulili, Ngeaninyagu at Campbelltown Arts Centre – the first comprehensive survey of Aboriginal artists from New South Wales – to The Aboriginal Memorial (1987), installed as the centrepiece of the National Gallery of Australia and today regarded as one of Australia’s most important works of art. Mundine was the Art Advisor at Milingimbi and curator at Bula-bula Arts in Ramingining, Arnhem Land for sixteen years where he initiated the ‘Aboriginal Memorial’, comprising 200 painted poles by forty-three artists from Ramingining, each symbolising a year since the 1788 British invasion. The Memorial was central to the 1988 Biennale of Sydney. Between 2005 & 2006 Mundine was resident at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka, Japan as a Research Professor in the Department of Social Research and is was awarded a PhD from Newcastle University. Djon Mundine OAM also won The Australia Council’s 2020 Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is currently an independent curator of contemporary Indigenous art and cultural mentor.

“All art is a conversation. Art is a social act – it is about the people of a society, not just what is fashionable at the time. Art is also about memory, remembering family.” — Djon Mundine

Contact Djon Mundine, bandjalungboy@hotmail.com or https://www.djonmundine.com/

Djon Mundine, Windows and Mirrors (2025)

Jasmin Stephens, Associate Curator

Jasmin Stephens is a curator, teacher and mentor and UNSW PhD researcher living and working in Sydney. She has held senior positions with Artbank, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and Fremantle Arts Centre. She has curated exhibitions at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Edith Cowan University, UTS Gallery, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, and with artist David Haines at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, in association with Asialink and facilitated programming by institutions and artists across Australia and in Singapore and Thailand. As part of research platform Contemporary Art and Feminism, she worked with London-based Genevieve Chua, as well as with Australian artists Alex Martinis Roe and Raquel Ormella at The Cross Art Projects in Sydney. She a lecturer in the Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW Art and Design. Jasmin is currently a collaborating curator on Sugar vs the Reef, a multi-year project led by artist Lucas Ihlein and guest curating with Samstag Museum Adelaide & PICA in Perth. Recent exhibitions include Composing Archipelagos, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart (2021); The essayist, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2019); Diagrammatic: Works by Lucas Ihlein and Collaborators, Deakin University, Melbourne (2018); Our Studio Selves, Artspace, Sydney (2017); and Artists as Cartoonists or Extended Black and White: Raquel Ormella, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2016).

Contact Jasmin Stephens, 0437 782 720, Jasm.Step@gmail.com

Art Historian/Writers

Catriona Moore

Catriona Moore is a critic, theorist and art historian who has dedicated her research to women modernist artists and contemporary feminist, environmental and comparative post-colonial visual art and culture (especially former British Dominions and new Republics). She has published widely on feminist aesthetics and women in art. Her feminist art histories include Indecent Exposures: Twenty years of Australian Feminist Photography (Allen & Unwin) and Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970 -90 (Artspace, Sydney). She was co-convenor of the research cluster Contemporary Art and Feminism at Sydney College of the Arts and senior lecturer in Art History and Film Theory at Sydney University.

Contact: Catriona Moore at catriona.moore@spin.net.au

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Gallery Photos / Plan

For curators: Download gallery floor plan as pdf

Exhibition proposal guidelines

Proposals for exhibitions are invited from professional curators and should be consistent with the gallery’s curatorial policy with work of the highest quality.

Priority will be given to proposals for exhibitions which:
•    Represent new works at the forefront of artistic practice both in Australia and overseas
•    Are innovative and reflect issues of current critical interest
•    Promote inter-cultural exchange
•    Provide opportunities for collaborations with other cultural organisations, funding agencies and sponsors.

Curatorial submissions: are reviewed every 3 months

Proposals should give:

•    A clear and concise written description of the exhibition or project outlining its concept and rationale (approx. 500 words)
•    Visual support material, such as digital image, website or video documentation. 
•    Biographical details of the artist(s) and curator(s), contact address, telephone numbers
•    A budget outline with details of funding for the exhibition including the catalogue, transport
•    Preferred date of the exhibition or project

The gallery

About Llankelly Lane & Cahors Building

This laneway is part of a Heritage Conservation Area renowned for its Art Deco architecture. The Cross Art Projects is located in Cahors a State Heritage Listed residential flat building. (Architects Joseland and Gilling, 1939.)

Nearby are other significant local residential flat buildings: Walmur by Emil Sodersten, Regents Court and Sandringham by Claud Hamilton, Gowrie Gate by Dudley Ward and Franconia by Leslie Nelisen who also designed the west side of Springfield Avenue (State Heritage Register). The reigning architectural glory is the Minerva (now Metro) Theatre and 2KY Radio building by Bruce Delit.

Narrow Llankelly Lane (6 metres across) links these special places and buildings. The lane was dignified with the name ‘Llankelly Lane’ in 1922, was renamed ‘Llankelly Place’ in the late 1980s after City Council acquired privately owned sections of the laneway, Springfield Avenue (renamed Springfield Mall) and garages on Orwell Street to create Springfield Gardens. The Mayor Doug Sutherland opened the gardens in 1986 (plaque).

In 2000-2003 architect Peter McGregor redesigned Llankelly Lane and Springfield Mall. His lightwork and pavements have become quiet local place markers and a sensitive evocation of a European style pedestrian lane. Residents are fighting to protect the area’s fine-grained residential and mixed commercial character, under threat from commercial ‘activatio’, a high rent monoculture and redevelopment for ‘luxury’ apartments which is forcing out low income residents.

Llankelly Lane the finish of a Green Bans Art Walk, 2011.

Artwork: Llankelly Place Lights by Peter McGregor

Running along Llankelly laneway between Darlinghurst Road and Orwell Street in Kings Cross, are 11 suspended lights (’roundells’). The lightwork doesn’t detract from the area’s residential amenity: the colours are laid out in a spectrum array from red to yellow to green at the Springfield Gardens end.

There is a colour-coded transition: red lights mark the entrance off Darlinghurst Road; in the middle from orange to yellow; then green for the residential flat buildings where the lane meets the trees of Springfield Park on Orwell Street. Architect and artist Peter McGregor was inspired by nearby El Alamein Memorial Fountain. McGregor’s design ensemble — lightwork, paving and the more subtle Springfield Mall—suggest the fine grain of interconnecting European lanes. Together they create a handsome addition to a Heritage Conservation landscape land link a lane to a public park. An active program dims each light on and off, at the average pace of a person walking — as the light sequence shifts from red near Darlinghurst Road to yellow then to green at the high density residential end of the lane. Artwork commissioned and installed by South Sydney Council in 2001.

Neon Heritage

The Art Deco Society has called for the Kings Cross district to be declared an Area of National Significance. Over the twentieth century, artists and writers have celebrated neon as the colours of the street, from poet Kenneth Slessor’s Darlinghurst Nights (1933) to Baz Luhrmann’s film ‘Strictly Ballroom’ (1992). In 2004 a fierce local campaign saved the neons from being pushed into a “standard design template”. After lobbying by the National Trust (NSW) and the Art Deco Society, Sydney City Council pronounced Darlinghurst Road “a unique neon precinct”. 

Llankelly LIghtwork photos courtesy: Peter McGregor.