Vale: 11 Randle Street, Surry Hills.
ABC RN – Brendan King / Simon Mahoney, 6.30 Tuesday
At the time of the inferno, early evening on Thursday 25 May 2023, no one was sleeping rough in 11 Randle Street. From accounts, the heritage listed building had been vacant for several years awaiting approval for re-development.
Built in 1912, the noble Henderson Hat Factory was intricately connected to Sydney’s contemporary art history. Housed here, from January 1983, were the first drafts of: Artspace (co-ordinator Judy Annear), Art Network magazine (Peter Thorn), Arts Law Centre (led by Shane Simpson, assisted by Carole Roberts) and the Artworkers Union meeting space for agitators for fees and contracts, health and safety and Affirmative Action for Women in the Visual Arts. Several floors above housed artist studios. Artspace was then an artist-run/membership gallery (with a co-ordinator) curating shows for up-and-coming artists. Controversially, amidst wild membership disputes at Randle St, Artspace gained an employed director. So began a distinguished lineage of directors: Judy Annear (co-ordinator then founding director), Gary Sangster and Sally Couacaud assisted by Suhanya Raffel.
Paul Irish, author of ‘Hidden in Plain View’, writes for Sydney Barani on the impact of Koori Art 84: a showing of 25 urban and remote artists curated by Vivian Johnson. Paul Irish writes, the pervasive colonial view that ‘real’ Aboriginal culture is unchanging. That is, remote art was unchanging and therefore ethnographic. Urban Aboriginal art was inauthentic.
Koori Art ’84 helped redefine Aboriginal art and launched artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Foley, Michael Riley and Gordon Syron. In 1987 a number of these artists formed the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. The same year, the gallery showed Pictures for Cities and was involved the following year with Two Worlds Collide. It exhibited Urban Koories (1986) and the travelling exhibition A Koori Perspective Tour (1990, curator Avril Quaill). In 1992 Artspace Gallery moved to its current home at the Gunnery Building in Woolloomooloo.
Sally Couacaud, Artspace Board Director 1988–92, was critical to the move from Randle Street to The Gunnery, then an artists’ squat space. Sally then became curator of the Sydney Open Museum and commissioned and managed the City of Sydney’s public art collection, including the Sculpture Walk with its focal point, the now dismantled Viva Voce by Debra Phillips at Speaker’s corner in the Domain, opposite AGNSW.
References:
Art Network, Summer 1983.
Isaacs, J, 1992, ‘The Public Face of Aboriginal Art in the 70s and 80s’, Kleinert, S, D Mundine and D McNeill (eds) in Aboriginal Art in the Public Eye, Art Monthly 2: Special Supplement, p 23-4
Johnson, V and T, 1984, Koori Art ’84 “ Artspace, 5th – 29th September 1984, Exhibition Catalogue, Surry Hills: Artspace
Johnson, V, 1990, ‘Into the urbane: Urban Aboriginal art in the Australian art context’, in Kleinert, S, D Mundine and D McNeill (eds) The land, the city : the emergence of urban Aboriginal art, Art Monthly Supplement, p 20-3
Koori Art ’84 Works List (Artspace Archive)
Quaill, A, 1990, A Koori perspective tour : an Artspace touring exhibition, Exhibition Catalogue, Surry Hills: Artspace