Art Gallery of New South Wales

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is one of Australia’s flagship art museums and the state’s leading visual arts institution, situated on the lands of the Gadigal people on the edge of Sydney Harbour.

As the state art museum, we’re here to champion artists and to serve the widest possible audience. Our vision is to be a beacon for art in Australia, reflecting and exploring perspectives from our unique place in the world. Our purpose is to enrich lives through meaningful encounters with art.

Reaching from contemporary projects with local artists to adventurous collection presentations and ambitious loan exhibitions and artist commissions, our program is anchored in a commitment to young and emerging generations and to Australian and global First Nations art.

In 2021, we celebrated our 150th anniversary, and in 2022, we completed our significant expansion through the Sydney Modern Project. This transformation of the Art Gallery creates a new art museum energised by commissions, centred on an art garden created by First Nations artist Jonathan Jones, and culminating in the extraordinary underground Nelson Packer Tank Gallery.

In 2024, the two buildings were given Aboriginal language names: Naala Badu and Naala Nura.

Name of the director of the institution: Maud Page

Name of the practice, initiative, or program nominated: Mike Hewson: The Key’s Under the Mat

Name and position of the professional who leads the practice: Justin Paton, Chief Curator

Describe the practice, program, or project, what innovative approach is proposed, and in which core museum activities it applies: conservation, education, collection, exhibition programs, publications, research, accessibility, communication, governance, and sustainability.

Mike Hewson: The Key’s Under the Mat is one of the most boundary-testing exhibitions realised in the 150-year history of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Created by artist, social sculptor and playground maker Mike Hewson, this project occupied a 2300 sqm former fuel tank with sculptures created from recycled materials that together formed an anarchic art park and sculptural commons in which new and unexpected audiences could ‘find their place’. Including a certified playground, functional ‘road-plate barbecue’, steam room and sauna, open-use recording studio, DJ booth, community gallery with, artist-designed cafe, communal laundromat sculpture, palm trees and other plantings, and artist residency ‘hovel’, this materially rich project challenged the institution on every front, from compliance to infrastructure to registration, conservation, interpretation and invigilation. Robust dialogue and collective resourcefulness led to new ways of working across every aspect of the show, and resulted in an exhibition that has been used energetically, unexpectedly and with deep affection by a record-breaking audience. Fundamental to the project (and true to the invitation and challenge embedded in its title) has been the Art Gallery’s commitment to The Key’s Under the Mat as a living space and social ecology, with gallery invigilators reimagined as ‘caretakers’ welcoming visitors and making the park’s facilities available to them. Determined to go beyond tokenistic and merely symbolic ideas of museum participation, the artist committed to the creation of ‘an infrastructure of surprise’, which notably included the construction of a richly detailed sculptural floor that permitted water and power to be brought into the formerly un-serviced space. The rewards of this commitment are evident in the intensity and variety of the uses the park has fostered, from community exhibitions, musical recording and album launches to parkour performances, a Queer Late Night Dance Party, and symposia on urban planning.

Explain in one sentence why you think the project you nominate is outstanding and could serve as an example for the entire community of modern and contemporary art museums.

Mike Hewson: The Key’s Under the Mat shows how art museums can foster more, deeper and more varied connections with their communities by going beyond simplistic ‘participatory’ gestures and embracing risk to create live, evolving and welcoming spaces whose uses are discovered by, rather than dictated to, their audience.

Explain why this practice or program is relevant and sustainable in creating meaningful and lasting connections with people, communities, and the museum context with a medium to long-term vision.

Not only has Mike Hewson’s art park welcomed an unprecedented number of visitors, those visitors have been unusually varied and multigenerational, and have engaged for far longer periods, and in more surprising ways, than is usual. The offering of dedicated spaces for communal and independent creativity, such as the sound recording studio and community gallery, has led to grass-roots relationships with local musicians, assisted studios for artists with disabilities, and social equity initiatives that are already bearing fruit in other areas of the Art Gallery’s programs. In a multitude of ways, the project has demonstrated that thoughtfully embracing risk and investing energy in the changing life of an exhibition leads to a depth and range of viewer experiences that—in an unpredictable but positive feedback loop—embolden an art museum to do things differently rather than reverting to assumptions.

What are the outcomes of the practice you are most proud of?

When our art museum opened in 1871, it was premised on the then-radical idea that art should be made available to everyone. Over 150 years later, Mike Hewson’s project has revisited, reimagined and productively unsettled our assumptions about how art museums can offer an open-ended welcome. Instead of treating the museum as a sacrosanct box within which ‘participation’ occurs in circumscribed spaces, the project vigorously examined and mobilised almost every aspect of the ‘museum’--from electrical services and air conditioning to staff uniforms and safety protocols. We are proud that the spirit of radical play and irreverent questioning that informs Hewson’s practice has been harnessed, not just as a theme, but an ethos informing its realisation—and thereby changing and invigorating the art museum and those who work in it too. As stimulating as the project has been, even more provocative is the question of what it leads us towards next.

How has the nominated practice changed your methods and ways of working?

Mike Hewson’s art park has fundamentally shifted the Art Gallery of NSW’s perspective on the role of the museum today. ‘The Key’s Under the Mat’ mandates that how the Art Gallery is experienced, used and transformed is not just the domain of artists and staff, but of audiences. While these experiences are catalysed by the physicality of Hewson’s sculptural provocations, which are themselves created from an unlikely community of found and repurposed local materials (including fragments of the museum's heritage architecture), it’s the institution’s operational shifts towards radical hospitality that unlocked the potential for unexpected use, resonating with visitors of all ages. From small gestures, like allowing food into the museum to be cooked on the Road-plate public barbecue, to larger gestures, like the provision of free and functioning laundry facilities for use alongside the functioning sauna, steam and shower sculptures, Hewson’s art park called for unprecedented collaboration and measured risk-taking, across building facilities, curatorial, security, visitor services and Executive.

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/mike-hewson/