Betty Churcher AO Memorial Oration 2023

- Wadda mooli, and Yuuma and Gurruburri all. My name is Bruce Johnson McLean. I am the Assistant Director, First Nations and the Head Curator, First Nations Art here at the National Gallery of Australia. And it's my pleasure to welcome you here tonight and provide the Acknowledgement of Country. Tonight, I've done so using three words. The first, Wadda mooli, is a word from my language and my family. It is a Weirdi word from the wider Birri-Gubba language and nation of Central Queensland. It states who I am and where I'm from and positions myself within this cultural landscape. The second word I used was Yuuma. If you're from Canberra, you might know this word. It is a Ngunnawal word of greeting. It is a word that Ngunnawal people have given to the people of Canberra as a gift, something to use every day. Through using that word, I pay my respect and the National Gallery's respect to all Ngunnawal Traditional Owners, past, present and those who still come on this country. The third word I use was Gurruburri. Gurruburri is a word used by Ngambri people. Ngambri are people who also have connections to the Canberra region and also share a lot of language with Wiradjuri people. For those of you who know the word Corroboree, Gurruburri is actually the root word for that word and it is a way to explain a coming together but also to address a meeting. So through using that word, I also acknowledge the existence, ongoing existence of Ngambri people within this cultural landscape as well. It's really my pleasure to acknowledge this place and welcome everybody tonight. And I did so also through using this yidaki. This was a gift to me by two artists, Gunybi Ganambarr and Yinimala Gumana from Yirrkala in Northeast Arnhem land. They gave this to me because they knew that I travelled around Australia, around the world, talking about our art and culture and they gave that to me and told me to play it as another way of bringing our living cultures to life wherever we go and in whatever we do. So I would also like to acknowledge not only Gunybi and Yinimala, but also all of the First Nations artists, staff and people that we work to enrich everything that we do here at the National Gallery with culture and with life. So in saying that, I'd like to give you another language word, bindi-you-ninda, in my language, that means thank you very much and I would like to introduce Gallery Director Dr. Nick Mitzevich to continue the proceedings. bindi-you, thank you.

- Thank you, Bruce. And I want to thank you for your beautiful yidaki playing. It always captures the room and holds you and reminds us the power of First Nations culture. I'd also like to acknowledge and pay my respects to Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and really express the National Gallery has an important responsibility to share First Nations culture here in Canberra, around Australia and around the world. And we look forward to continuing that as we open Emily Kngwarray tomorrow. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the 2023 Betty Churcher Memorial Oration and a special welcome to audiences across Australia who are joining us this evening online. The Betty Churcher Memorial Oration was first established in 2020 to honour Betty's legacy and amplify the voice of leading women in the arts who have inspired us through their creativity, their inclusiveness, and their engagement in the arts. And the idea for the lecture came through our Gender Equity Advisory Committee led by National Gallery Council members Sally Smart and Alison Kubler, and I want to thank them for their inspiration. Betty Churcher's leadership was inspiring to me personally and a whole generation of arts professionals. The wider community also felt her presence with her passion for the arts. And appointed in 1990, Betty Churcher was the first woman director of the National Gallery and she led the National Gallery by encouraging and challenging her staff and the public to see art in new ways. As an eminent art educator, she elevated learning and public engagement during her tenure. And during her seven years as director, Betty brought the world's best art to Australia and she dedicated her time to bringing major touring exhibitions into Australia, and this gained her the nickname Betty Blockbuster. One can only wish to have a nickname like that. Major exhibitions under Betty's leadership included "Rembrandt to Renoir," "The Age of Angkor," and "Rubens and the Italian Renaissance," to mention three of a dozen during her tenure. Her aim was always to give people confidence to enjoy art, to see its relevance and broaden its impact on Australian culture. And Edmund Capon, the Former Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales summed her up by saying, "Betty embraced both the scholar and the public at large and she never discriminated between the two." Another highlight of Betty's tenure was the insightful and poignant 1994 exhibition, "Don't Leave Me This Way, "Art in the Age of AIDS," the first exhibition in the world to tackle the challenging topic of HIV AIDS. Betty was brave and ambitious and she was most admired. What I most admired was her absolute focus on the creative class that made art for the sheer necessity of it. And I'd like to share with you an extract from the exhibition catalogue that Betty wrote. She said, "I'm well aware that many people will feel that this is an unusual project for the National Gallery of Australia to undertake, a book and an exhibition on a topic that most would rather not think about, much less confront so directly. From my perspective as Director, 'Don't Leave Me This Way, Art in the Age of AIDS' reflects our commitment to Australia's premier art institution, presenting a series of exhibitions and publications which mirrors the collision of contemporary art with the essential fabric of life at the close of a troubled century. This program is designed deliberately to encounter the often held belief that contemporary art is inevitably abstracted and alienated from everyday life. Nothing surely could be further from the truth." Quite extraordinary she made that statement and it has such relevance today. Betty's forward thinking in her leadership set the National Gallery on a path that we are proud of today. And like Betty, I believe that art should be shared with all Australians and reflect our community and the concerns of our society. What better way to talk about the world than through the eyes of an artist? I'm so pleased tonight also that Betty's family can join us and I'd like to particularly acknowledge Betty's children, Ben, Paul, Peter and Tim and their families for their support in bringing this initiative to fruition. And how fitting tonight to have an inspirational leader join us like Maria Balshaw, the Director of the Tate? Maria was appointed in June, 2017 and she became the first woman to hold this position, like Betty Churcher. Maria champions inclusivity, and under her leadership the Tate has reframed its global context. And Maria's approach has furthered the mission of inclusion and equality, which has led the Tate to connect with a wider, more dynamic audience. The Tate has never been so relevant, so popular, and so insightful in harnessing the issues of today through the eyes of artists. Prior to her position at the Tate, Maria held a dual directorship of the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Manchester City Galleries. And through her dual directorship, brought two institutions together with a historic and modern collection, really amplifying its impact. Maria is chair of the National Museum Director's Council in Britain and she also is a member of the Women Leaders in Museums Network and also a member of the influential Bizot group of leading world global museums. In 19, sorry, in 2015, she became a member of the Order of British Empire for her exceptional service to the arts. I've long admired Maria's leadership and the work that she's undertaking in the Tate, certainly elevating the climate crisis, gender equity and decolonisation, to mention three very serious issues is something that we're also inspired by. And the synergies working with the Tate and the National Gallery seem to be such a great partnership given our shared concerns and the way that we wanna elevate the voice of artists. So please join me in welcoming Maria Balshaw to the stage.

- Thank you very much, Nick, and thank you to all of you for coming this evening. I'd just like to acknowledge how much I appreciate and recognise the welcome that I have been given to this place. So thank you also to you, Bruce. It is really an honour to be speaking and to giving the oration for the 2023 Betty Churcher AO Memorial Oration. As Nick said, I took up my role as director of Tate now six and a half years ago. For anyone who is unfamiliar with what the Tate is, I thought I'd give you a potted history. Tate holds the UK's national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day. Alongside that, we are also responsible for international, modern and contemporary art, which, as Nick says, over the past decade, has become genuinely global and transnational. I realise I will need this. We show and share this collection across four museums in the UK, not everyone is aware there are four Tates in Britain, and we also tour the collection nationally and internationally. So Tate has a powerful international reach and a leadership role in terms of thinking about the past and future of the global artistic ecology. Truly, our remit now spans the globe, including through fruitful and productive ongoing partnerships, relationships here in Australia. This role is an expansive one, hence the title of my lecture today. But this kind of globally connected role is a fairly recent thing for Tate. The first ever Tate gallery, now known as Tate Britain, this building, it doesn't always look like this, but this was a Christmas celebration staged by British Asian artist Chila Burman, to keep us happy during the pandemic when all the museums were closed and weather was very bad, but this became the highlight of the cultural scene in London. This building stood alone in the Tate fold until the 1980s. So when I as a young woman ventured to London to find modern art, there was only this Tate. I am pleased to say that I encountered some art, Bridget Riley, Henri Matisse particularly stay in my mind, that helped shaped my teenage thinking about art. But even more fortunate for me, Tate in 1988, opened this building, Tate Liverpool. I arrived at the same moment as a student at Liverpool University and this gallery was created as part of a deliberate move to share the national collection more equitably across the whole nation and especially in the north of England. I don't think anyone at that point thought a young student crossing the threshold here would end up as the director of Tate. But this gallery truly opened my mind to the dynamic repertoire of modern and contemporary art that Tate held then and continues to hold. A few years after this Tate opened, another space was created in St. Ives in Cornwall. The gallery looks out over a beautiful beach and across the Atlantic Ocean in a town that was made famous by the presence of Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and the British and international artists who moved to this artist enclave in the middle of the 20th century. And then, and most of you will have heard of this, in 2000, Tate Modern opened. It was received with great acclaim, a former power station transformed into London's first truly contemporary gallery of art, overlooking the River Thames. It was expected in its first year to welcome 1.5 million visitors and the then director Nick Serota said that was an ambitious target. However, the public had even greater curiosity and five million people came in the first year. It has since welcomed more than 100 million people to the gallery. So Tate collects works of the highest quality that reflect the art of the past and the present as we understand it today. But underneath this very broad mission that has been in place for more than 125 years, we are an institution in motion, driven by our wish to make our collection and our programs more diverse, more adventurous and more inclusive of the widest spectrum of artistic practice so that we share it with ever wider audiences. To my mind, Tate has a dual purpose. It's a major public museum that holds the national collection, as well as shaping and responding to the global arts ecology. But at the same time, as a museum director looking to the future, I lead an institution which is actively seeking to widen its public reach, and particularly to connect to future generations of gallery visitors and to reflect and serve the communities that these four galleries sit within, many of whom are not regular arts visitors. And at the same time, of course we serve an expanded digital audience spread across the globe. It is a huge challenge for all museums I think to genuinely reflect the demographics of the cities and the regions that we find ourselves in and to move beyond the visitors that we have seen historically, who always very welcome, and nonetheless have tended to be the well educated, the well heeled, and generally, at least in the UK, a pretty white audience. But as we look at London, which moves toward being a majority minority ethnic city, it is already in terms of London's under 30s population, it's a city where we know that more than 300 languages are spoken, more than any other city in the world. And when we see economic inequality too often mapped onto social inequality, that's then reflected in unequal access to the arts and all the benefits that they bring, I know and I think many other museum directors know that to connect to a wider audience is the challenge of our age. So at Tate, we are using our world-leading collection and the relationships that we have built with internationally acclaimed artists to serve and speak to our neighbours as well as speaking to the world. My late friend and very dear colleague, Achim Borchardt-Hume, who was Director of Exhibitions at Tate Modern, would often say, "As a museum of international art, "we cannot arrive like a spaceship from the art world, "landing in a random spot "and having no relationship with our area. "Our starting point must be our home, "no matter what global story we're telling." And if our core purpose is to hold our collection in perpetuity for the public, then we must consider how that collection reflects those communities, inviting them in. What this really depends on is finding ways to demonstrate in concrete terms how our institutions and our collections can connect to a wider public meaningfully. I was presented with an extraordinary opportunity not long after I joined Tate by the Turner Prize winning, Oscar winning film director and artist Steve McQueen. Steve had long carried with him the germ of an idea about creating a school photograph of London. Knowing the considerable logistical hurdles in finding a way to do this across the 33 different boroughs in London, Steve, rather cannily, approached me, presenting me with an idea that I felt Tate could not turn down. He proposed creating school photographs of the staged kind of school class photo of all the seven and eight-year-olds in London, children from year three at school, which gave the work its title. He then outlined that he wanted to assemble those works as a single artwork in the Duveen's Galleries, the largest single free to access space at Tate Britain. There's two of the children photographed, finding themselves. Steve said this would serve as a portrait of London and that the city's future creative potential would be caught in that and he wanted to embody in the work itself the idea that each of these children would find themselves at the heart of the national art collection and be part of this collection for the rest of their lives. Steve himself had been brought to Tate as a child and told us, "I remember my first school trip to Tate "when I was an impressionable 8-year-old. "I loved to draw, but until I came to Tate, "I did not know it was a thing that was culturally valued. "It gave me an understanding that anything is possible," and his whole career has demonstrated that that is so. Just about 77,000 children saw themselves in Tate Britain in this vast national school photograph, along with, of course, their parents, their siblings and their teachers. The project included every kind of school and every background of child. So very small educational centres for children with physical and learning needs were supported to bring the children. There were private schools as well as state schools and what you saw was a humbling portrait of the remarkable diversity of London's young population. Through the rigour and equality of the process and the display of the work, it valued every child as the exceptional individuals that they are and will continue to be. The task of the museum, to connect to a wider public, is one that sits at the heart of our contemporary purpose. This year at Tate Britain, following this remarkable work, the entire team have worked to rehang the more than 500 years of British art that we hold in our collection, the result being that visitors to Tate Britain can now discover more than 800 works by over 350 artists spanning six centuries and presenting the true diversity of British artistic production. These are just two rooms and one from the past and one very close to our present. Of these works, 70 of them have entered the collection in the last five years alone, these acquisitions deliberately brought into the British collection to extend and diversify the canon of historic and modern British art. So room by room, the visitor travels the world as it reflects on the UK's interdependency and connection to a global story of transformation and change, moving us away from a narrow and nationalistic island history. For every British artist who spent their life in Britain, there is one shown who was born elsewhere or whose identity is cross-cultural. This is a wonderful room of Aubrey Williams' works. The history of museums, when we look at it as a form of cultural infrastructure, is of course intrinsically linked with the systems of power and influence that prevailed when our institutions were founded. If we are to genuinely expand and diversify our audience, we have to tell a more inclusive story. Last year at Tate Britain, "Life Between Islands," a game-changing exhibition, was developed by Director Alex Farquarson with his team. It presented 70 years of intergenerational culture experience and ideas by British Caribbean artists. This was the Sonia Boyce that was the lead image for the poster. Of course, she won the Golden Lion in Venice. We now know her work really well, but when I arrived five years ago, there was only one work by her in Tate's collection and I'm glad to say that that has changed. The exhibition drew from artists from London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and beyond, and it was the first time a UK museum had chosen to tell this story. As we developed the research for the exhibition, we realised this was also the moment to correct the historical gap in our so-called National Collection. It didn't adequately tell the history of black British cultural production from the 1960s onwards and especially didn't reflect Sonia's generation of work, you know, started producing in the 1980s and after. So in making the exhibition, we have actively addressed the gaps in the collection so that the history of British Caribbean art in the 20th century is now embedded in the permanent collection. This exhibition brought in for the first time to Tate Britain an audience that reflected the nearly 50% of Londoners who identify as black and minority ethnic. Sometimes though, the work of the gallery takes us far beyond exhibitions. On occasion we are powerfully implicated in the social and political contexts we find ourselves in. With a project like Year 3, it was very easy to get the public and politicians behind the whole project. You know, who doesn't want seven-year-olds and eight-year-olds to be valued and supported to be creative? Five years later, this past year, we've worked with an artist on a very different kind of public art project that took on a much more traumatic and still ongoing tragedy, the terrible fire in 2017 at the Grenfell Tower block in London, which killed 72 people and continues to affect bereaved families and the wider community. This devastating event resulted in the greatest loss of life in a residential fire since the Second World War and the Grenfell community are still fighting for justice and acknowledgement of the criminal negligence that took place. So through 2022 and '23, British artist Chris Ofili devised and proposed a three part mural for the walls of the largest public staircase in Tate Britain. This is how it looks there now. Titled "Requiem," the mural focuses on young artist Khadija Saye who had lost her life in the fire and who Chris had met a month before she died. The mural, moving in three chapters, shows a journey through an imagined landscape of giant skies, vast horizons and flowing water, depicting the transition from the almost unbearable place of sadness and loss at the beginning to an endpoint that moves towards peace. Khadija is at the heart of this mural, her pose drawn from her own self-portrait, "Andichurai," which is also on display at Tate Britain. This is the work that Chris drew on. Despite the work's ultimately redemptive tone, it was born out of Chris's strong sense of injustice. This was, he felt, a preventable fire and those who had lost their lives were victims of austerity and inequality. We knew that if we were to make this public artwork a success, we had to work in completely different and very sensitive ways. With Chris's blessing, we talked to the directly affected communities. There are five different constituted groups that represent the very diverse communities of bereaved families and survivors. In a day of work unlike anything I have ever done before, and with the support of our truly brilliant Director of Learning at Tate, Mark Miller, I carefully explained to each of the group leaders what Chris wanted to do and why we thought it was important. We held this conversation knowing that this was their tragedy and that they might not agree that this was a suitable topic for a public work of art. Individuals gave honest and often deeply emotional feedback and this then informed how Chris ultimately realised the work. It also profoundly affected how we thought about it. We then had to go through an equally sensitive discussion with our own colleagues, some of whom really didn't think that Tate should be taking this project on. We opened the mural in July, having got the blessing from Khadija's remaining family as well as the wider groups, and we ensured that they were the first public that got to see the mural. We have agreed that it should stay in place for a minimum of 10 years, as we know that it is likely to take at least this long for the criminal proceedings to be concluded. For the families, the mural is a way of keeping the tragedy in the public mind and they've told us that they value the fact that Tate is using its cultural clout in this way. For our wider public, we hope that the mural, like many great works of art, will serve as a space for reflection and emotion, as well as provoking deep thought about the society that we live in. On occasions, the very nature of the artistic projects that we do lend themselves to a deepening of local relationships as well as exploring the challenges we face on the planet. And the issues around the climate emergency, as Nick said in his introduction, have been very much at the forefront of our mind. Last autumn at Tate Modern, the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna worked with us to create "Brain Forest Quipo." This is one slide of a work that's almost impossible to catch in a photograph. Two monumental sculptures hanging 27 metres from the ceiling of our Turbine Hall, each woven together using a range of organic and found materials, including unspun wool, cardboard, shells, ceramics, glass and bones. This installation was an act of mourning for the destruction of forests and the subsequent impact of climate change, as well as violence on indigenous peoples. It evoked bleached out trees and destroyed environments. Now Tate Modern is situated in the London borough of Suffolk, home to a significant Latin American community. So as part of the making of this work, Cecilia invited women from the community and asked them to help gather materials from the banks of the River Thames. There's a beach almost in front of Tate Modern. She incorporated their objects into the sculpture and once it was made, she invited the participants and the wider community to sing the work into being, invoking the spirit of her ancestors and her community of origin and connecting the people in London to that community and to the spirit of her ancestors. Then the following day, in a rather more activist mode, she convened a public day of protest and mourning about the climate and nature catastrophe, bringing nearly 2,000 people into the Turbine Hall. So the creation of the artwork became simultaneously an active creation of community, forging new connections that we hope will be lasting. Work like this has long happened up in Tate Liverpool. We have been leaders there in creative learning within the community from the very day we opened our doors at a time when the whole city was recovering from civil unrest, high unemployment, and a real sense of challenge. The gallery over the years has played a key role in the city's cultural regeneration, placing art at the heart of civic life there. Sometimes this is simple and joyous. So this is the "Liverpool Mountain" by Ugo Rondihone. It stands outside Tate Liverpool. It's become a local landmark, one of the most Instagrammed artworks in Tate's collection. But in other work we try very directly to tackle the acute social challenges that exist across our local communities in Liverpool and wider Mersey side. So colleagues in Liverpool have connected to that other great Scouse cultural passion, football, and I have to say I went to Liverpool University because I supported the football team, which just shows you how foolish 18-year-old thinking is. But football is really important to this city. So the team up in Liverpool have developed an arts and sport-based mental health and literacy program called Tackling the Blues. Some of the young people involved you can see here. The Blues is the nickname for Everton, not my team, but you know, I'm very pleased they work with us anyway, and Tackling the Blues has supported thousands of young people across Liverpool who are experiencing mental illness. And the work is ongoing to continue to support them to thrive as citizens of that foreign city. Liverpool is, also historically was, the UK's most important port city. And so of course it is also a point of arrival for migrants from all over the world. This still happens almost as vigorously as it did through the 18th and 19th century. And earlier this year, Tate Liverpool's participation in the Liverpool Biennial reminded us of the internationalism of our local community. We showed recently acquired work by Salvadorian exile artist Guadalupe Maravilla. This is the work in Liverpool. Guadalupe was one of the many thousands of children displaced and made stateless by the Civil War in El Salvador, finding his way across the border into the US, as a child. His work addresses this displacement and also constructs a regenerative healing mode of art practice. These works are both sculptures and performance tools. They can be worn and the gongs create sound baths that aid healing. The practice itself played a large part in Guadalupe's own recovery from serious illness. In creating the right context for the work in Liverpool, Guadalupe spent time in the city and connected to a group of displaced migrants who worked to co-create a war mural, tracing their personal journeys to Liverpool. I'm afraid this is my bad photograph of it. Guadalupe's work challenges western notions of healing and wellness, and so asks us to think differently about how we can create wider networks of social, political and cultural connection through the work that we do in the gallery. And down in Cornwall, links to the local community are just as vital. St. Ives is both a summer holiday destination, a place of considerable privilege for many, but then in the wintertime, also a rather isolated coastal community with deep local deprivation. It was created as a gallery to respond to the legacy of the artists who had made the town its home. And so from the very beginning, we wanted to honour community at the heart of the gallery. Each year we try to weave local and global stories together in a way that meets the needs of both tourist visitors and local residents, especially young people. So right this week at Tate St. Ives, artist Ro Robertson has been in residence and will open a show that shows the outcome of that time. Making work that is locally rooted but internationally significant, centred on heritage and place but through a contemporary lens, Ro has combined drawings made on the beach at St. Ives with sculptures created in the nearby studio. This is just one excerpt of the work. They hadn't finished installing it, so I didn't have anything more than that. He uses, they use automatic techniques to draw freely and unconsciously, reflecting the improvisation of the sea and the chance compositions it leaves behind. Where whilst the sculptures are cut and welded from steel to reflect the movement of the artist's body. Ro says the work addresses the idea of existing in between, the meeting point between mind and body, body and land, land and sea. And they describe the work as, "Occupying a place "outside the rigid binary structures I've learned "to otherwise bend myself around. "I embody this as a tactic against being deemed "against nature as an LGBTQ plus person "and being considered at odds "with the environment around me." So Ro's work opens in the gallery this week on the other side of the globe. So perhaps we can think about the oceans that connect us as a circulating force for the exchange of ideas and for reframing the relationship between art and the world. As we do this, we create a larger space for artists to work in and we offer the possibility that those who have for so long been bent out of shape can find a more expansive space to unbend. All of these examples speak of the possibilities that emerge from building a rooted sense of locality and community alongside our internationalism. There were other strands of work at Tate, thatspeak of change that I want to highlight. Since I arrived, I've been accelerating the necessary work to increase the representation of women artists in the collection, along with LGBTQ plus artists, black artists, artists of colour, those who identify as disabled or neurodiverse, and artists who come from First Nation or indigenous cultures. I want to speak first a bit about gender equity because I'm so impressed and inspired by the National Gallery's Know My Name campaign, which as you will all know, celebrates the work of women artists and their contribution to Australian cultural life. Here in 2019, the gallery was honest enough to acknowledge that only 25% of its Australian art collection and 33% of its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collection was by women artists. It's a disparity that is just too common across public museums, including at Tate. This resulted in them establishing the gallery's first guiding principles for gender equity. Betty Churcher would be proud. Tate is similarly committed to improving the representation of women artists in our programs and in our collection. For the first time, the last two years have seen us purchase more work by women artists than men, including younger generation of female artists, such as Rachel Jones. This it's a huge painting, really wonderful. She's one of a new generation of London-based abstract painters from the still fantastic London art schools, and this brilliant texturally dynamic canvas is part of the 2000s room in the rehang at Tate Britain. But in a nearby room, we can draw a line from Rachel, still just about in her 20s I think, one of the youngest artists in the collection, all the way back to artist Joan Carlile the one on your left here, who painted this portrait of an unknown lady in 1650. Carlile thought to be the first woman in Britain to have worked as a professional portrait painter in oil. Though for a long time her works were assumed to be those of a man. Tate acquired in 2016 an accelerated research on the representation of women throughout British art history. So the inclusion of women from the beginning of the collection starts to rewrite the stereotypical view that women didn't paint until the 19th or even the 20th century. My favourite example of this is Mary Beale, the work on the other side here. Mary was the driving force of a husband and wife studio established in 1671 in Pall Mall in Central London. Far from being the lesser partner, while Mary painted, her husband Charles, who she did a really very fine portrait of, primed canvases, procured art supplies and kept the books. She made money from her work and was feted as a society portraitist. Just last week we were considering, this is confidential, by the way, this wonderful work, which we hope to bring into the collection and our research tells us was created as a commercial commission and sold for a considerable sum. So a woman making her living through art in the 1650s. So like at the NGA, this is all an ongoing research project and historical reconstruction work that will run for many, many more years so that we are able to tell a richer, more rounded and more interesting version of our distant past, as well as our own era. But I'm pleased to say this sense of expanding histories also applies to our more recent past. The exhibition "Women in Revolt!" opened at Tate Britain just a few weeks ago. "The Screaming Housewife" is the lead image. It places centre stage the work of politically engaged female artists working between 1970 and 1990, who they are artists who challenged British culture and paved the way for future generations of artists, curators, and directors of museums, myself definitely included. This is a history from outside the art establishment and it chimes with my own experience of growing up in the 1970s and '80s in a working class family outside London. I saw some of the work in this exhibition on protest marches, in community centres, in feminist magazines or on the covers of really amazing singles by feminist punk bands like The Slits. I did not see that work in museums or in galleries. And so like many young working class women, I didn't really feel I very much belonged in those kinds of high cultural spaces. Until far too recently, many of these artists have never shown their work in public museums. Even in 2023, it was the first time for many of the more than 100 women included in this show. The exhibition spans the very widest definition of feminist activism. It ranges from popular culture, this is Linder, who did record covers as well as films, standing with her work, anti-Thatcher protests, I remember this very well, the Women's Anti-Nuclear Campaign at Greenham Common where these extraordinary banners were made, black feminist protests like this brilliant work by Marlene Smith, but also conceptual work, this is Susan Hiller, and socialist feminist critique of how women's experience was still marginalised even within anti-capitalist protest. This is Mary Kelly and others. The avowed activism of so much of this work I feel gives a really useful counterpoint to the activist politics of today. It shows younger generations that they have an activist history. What comes through most strongly in the show is a sense of collective joy in solidarity, as well as anger and a wicked, brilliant sense of humour. This one is proving very popular on Instagram. The show itself was devised and brought to fruition by collaborative feminist practice in our own time, brilliant curator Linsey Young, leading a team of inter-generational art advisors that included Griselda Pollack, artist Marlene Smith and Lubaina Himid. I'm really proud that this show is developed on my watch and I'm glad that it's available for my own 20-something daughter and sons. We are at a long overdue point where the barriers and stories that held women artists back in the past are being rewritten by women who now hold positions of influence in museums, academia, and the wider sphere of the arts. So Tate Modern Curator Ann Coxon, for example, had long wanted to show stitched and woven works, which are now a critical part of our program, but was told that they were low art, crafty, domestic, you know, in short that it was too female. Counter to that, it's been pursued to great success in our recent program at Tate Modern with exhibitions like Anni Albers, Cecilia Vicuna's Turbine Hall, and these wonderful Magdalena Abakanowicz's monumental, bodily vegetable fibre sculptures which drew to the gallery twice as many visitors as we had forecast, only showing us that our own expectations are still too limited. The major solo show by Albers in 2018 put weaving in the spotlight. For centuries, loom had been seen, at least from a European perspective, as a tool for crafts people, not artists. And so Albers' work lived in craft and design museums, not in art collections. Tate Modern's exhibition challenged these perceptions by exploring Albers as the highly original abstract artist that she is, someone vital to the history of modernism and who continues to inspire generations of artists. The exhibition was a huge success and it also drove and pushed forward change within our acquisitions to bring more fibre work in. So these then came into the collection, quilts by the Gee's Bend women, an intergenerational community of African American women living in Alabama. Many of the women are direct descendants of enslaved people forced to labour at the cotton plantation established there by Joseph Gee in 1816. Although they were made originally by necessity, the tradition rapidly evolved into creative innovation and intergenerational transmission of a highly distinctive, politically resistant aesthetic tradition. They now live in Tate's collection and have been some of the most popular works we've had on display. All of this is really important work, but making these changes does involve, as a museum director, putting one's head above the parapet. I can tell you there's nothing quite like rehanging the British Art collection to trigger charges of rewriting history, conjuring notions of me or my colleagues trampling blindly over sacred ground. One newspaper accused Tate of presenting a history underpinned by an exculpatory desire to distance ourself from our imperial past, which is funny because I thought we were doing the opposite. We are striving for proximity rather than distance and expanding history rather than trying to hold it at bay. The art on display holds multiple truths, just as they hold multiple histories and these truths may speak to the lived experiences of those who, in the past, have felt unacknowledged. As writer Afua Hirsch has argued, as part of a brilliant set of books developed by our retail team to accompany the rehang, she says, "If history is written by the victor, then art, "throughout the history of modern European traditions, "has of course been commissioned by the oppressor." This needs to be recognised and acknowledged if we are to move forward in the now. It seems to me museums are at a point where we are finding ways to answer the question of how to centre other narratives. Here, Australia's museums particularly inspire us. We've seen in recent years the centring of First Nation voices. The National Gallery, my generous host this evening, is home to the world's largest collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander work and gives increasing prominence within its artistic and learning programs to this work, as you will all have the joy of seeing in coming weeks. On my last visit to Sydney a few months ago, I was delighted to see Sydney Modern, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, home to the Yiribana Gallery, dedicated to art by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art people. At Tate, we're also indebted to the work of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia who've worked with us since 2015 through a joint acquisitions program supported by Qantas, which has allowed the two institutions to jointly acquire 35 works of art by 24 leading contemporary Australian artists, including work by leading Aboriginal artists. These works were shown at Tate Modern in spring 2021 when we opened "A Year in Art, Australia, 1992." This is just one of the rooms. The starting point for the show was the Mabo Decision of 1992 and through the varied works acquired, it directly addresses questions of land rights, social equity, police violence, and the struggle around the right of First Nation peoples to assert unique connections to and custodianship of the lands of their ancestors. We showed the works as contemporary artworks consistent with Tate's wider approach to the display of transnational and transcultural art forms, acknowledging First Nations art has its own dynamic history, presenting a generative alternative cosmology, time and space, which has also been significantly impacted by the trauma and violence of colonisation. We wanted our audiences in London to be aware of these multiple perspectives and to their centrality to thinking about cultural identity in Australia today. The show included this work, the first bark painting to come into Tate's collection. It included work by Emily Kngwarray, as well as younger generations of Aboriginal artists like Yhonnie Scarce or this Tracey Moffatt. Free to access, this exhibition based on our collection, could not have been more impactful. It was seen by more than a million people in the year that it was on show. But building this collection, and indeed, making that exhibition, took significant institutional change. Bark painting, along with other Aboriginal craft materials and artworks, have been historically categorised as ethnography and craft, placed outside the western canon of art, certainly within UK and Europe. When I arrived at Tate, I acted to shift any lingering traces of this problematic categorisation. It's just like the categorization of craft as not art. These kinds of inherited categories define knowledge and status within our institutions and reinforce prejudices and inequalities, so they have to be faced down and changed. And for this reason, we follow our Australian counterparts and now explicitly recognise collecting and work by First Nation and indigenous artists as a critical priority for our collection. At this year's Frieze Art Fair, just a month or so ago, we acquired this work on bark cloth by Peruvian artist Santiago Yahuarcani. Like the Guadalupe Maravilla work I mentioned earlier, this work forms part of a healing regenerative arts practice that expands our knowledge and thinking about the world. The research we are doing to help develop these things also allows us to extend specialised curatorial focus. We have funding now for an adjunct curator role in First Nation and indigenous art. Kimberly Moulton was appointed in the role. Yes, I'm very delighted, a Yorta Yorta woman from Australia whose, as many of you will know, whose extensive curatorial work includes 17 exhibitions with Museums Victoria. Kimberly is not on her own, however, she's part of an expanded network, coordinated group of global curators at Tate who reside in their continents and their countries and help us pioneer transnational work, changing what our institution looks like on the inside as well as what we share with the public. So this has implications across all of Tate. In February next year, we will see the UK's first large scale work by a Sami artist, Outi Pieski, a visual artist whose practise is deeply connected to her land, a region that is now divided between the nation states of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. She's gained recognition for exploring the spiritual relationship between humans and their environment, posing questions around traditional knowledge and indigenous people's rights. She'll put down roots with us in Cornwall, as the artists whose work is shown there so often do, staying in residence to make work in collaboration with the local community. As we rethink our approach to the indigenous works coming into our collection and programs and think to change who works for us as well as changing our public, we are also thinking through the very roots and means by which we acquire works so that they become more inclusive. The acquisition model at Tate, like any major museum like us, has been straightforwardly transactional, you know, a western capitalist model where we buy things and then keep them forever. And this itself doesn't sit so well with artists whose long care and stewardship of their land, their belief systems and their culture is based on non-ownership thinking. So we had to go on a journey to work with the artist Edgar Calel, a Maya-Katchekel artist from Guatemala. This is his work, now in Tate's collection, called "The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge." In this, the rocks are altars, the fruit and vegetables placed upon them, sourced from the local area, cut in a ritual conducted by a member of the Katchekel community in order for the work to be deemed complete. His work evokes a connection to his ancestors and pays homage to the local indigenous communities within Guatemala, so it's an offering to those artist ancestors. When he installed the work with us in Tate Liverpool, he came to the gallery and activated the work by cutting the fruits, burning incense, conducting a ceremony somewhat to the alarm of some of the conservators. But we had to change our rules of engagement and behaviour in order to create the right space for the work. And then, in creating the acquisition agreement, working closely with the artist, we developed a new model for custodianship. So rather than owning this work, we are now its custodian for 13 years, a number of great significance in the Mayan calendar, after which a new agreement will be made, either to renew, to pass it to another institution or return the work to the earth. We didn't pay the artist for the work, rather we paid a donation towards the community for their ongoing stewardship of the land and the way of life. This was honestly a momentous shift for our organisation. It took agreement by all of our trustees and we had to propose a change in our governance rules with government. What we proposed, therefore, creates a direct line between a European ownership based organisation to an indigenous community whose culture asks us to imagine a more reciprocal and generative model of sharing. The work has also sharpened our determination to change our collection care policies and museum's operation to speed our movement towards net zero museum practice because we cannot hold works like this if caring for them then exacerbates the damage to the world we all share. So I'd like to end on two remarkable women, both of whom brought me here from London this evening. The National Gallery's Emily Kngwarray show opens tomorrow. Needing little introduction to you, this work, this artist represents I think the most significant contemporary painter to emerge in the 20th century in Australia and also across the world. She was extraordinary, a renowned elder from the Utopia region of the Northern Territory, producing more than 3,000 paintings in the last eight years of her life. Seeing her work for the first time was one of those knockout life moments for me on a research trip to Australia 15 years ago. So I have been excited about this show ever since I heard from Nick of its inception. And therefore, I'm delighted to share with all of you that in partnership and friendship with the National Gallery of Australia here in Canberra, we will be bringing this exhibition to Tate Modern in 2025. It's a vital thing for us to do. It will be the first large scale showing of Kngwarray’s work in Europe, I think probably providing a once in a lifetime opportunity for audiences to see the vast extent and diversity of her practice and the partnership, as well as this exhibition, breaks new ground for Tate as well as for the National Gallery with two major national museums, placing awareness and knowledge of First Nations art at the very forefront of their programming. I am hugely grateful to Nick for working with us on this. The second remarkable woman is of course Betty Churcher, and I thought a slide of her laughing was the right thing to end on, the first and only woman to lead the National Gallery. I feel honoured, as a fellow female museum director, to have been asked to speak at an event held in this inimitable woman's name. Her legacy embodies my aspirations for Tate, making art accessible to a wider public, ensuring that the works in our galleries represent the dynamism and diversity of the global art scene. From everything I hear about her, Betty was passionate and pragmatic in equal measure and she achieved an enormous amount, particularly for women in the arts, who she tirelessly championed. I have no doubt that Churcher faced some of the same challenges I do as a female cultural director, challenges that are male counterparts simply are not confronted by. Perhaps this is why Betty, as I have done, forged her own mode of leadership that could be described as traditionally female, but in fact should be seen as the compassionate, relational, people-centred leadership that is needed for the challenging times we all live in. It's a model I see very clearly embedded in Nick Mitzevitch's brave leadership of this wonderful national gallery, and it's a model I try to hold to myself. So can I end with my thanks to Nick and all of the staff at the National Gallery of Australia for inviting me to speak today? Thanks to you all for listening and for making me feel so welcome. It has been a real pleasure talking to you.

- Wow, I feel exhausted. Thank you so much. It's such an inspiration to hear about putting action into the community, connecting with people. So many elements are redefining what a 21st century art museum looks like and we're so privileged to hear about the work that you and your colleagues have done across Britain, across the world. And thank you for so generously agreeing to answer a few questions in the next few minutes. We've got about five or six minutes left and we've got a couple of questions that we've got from either online and from the room. So we might start with the first question that we have. How do you see the role of Tate evolving into the future?

- Well, I mean I could speak for far too long on that, but I think the answer is that to remain a relevant art museum or cultural institution, you have to be in a process of evolution. So the things that I can see coming quite soon are that Tate Liverpool, after all that amazing work in 35 years, has just closed because we've been able to draw money from central government to support the ongoing levelling up of our country, you know, life outcomes and economics in the north of England are still nowhere near the south and that has to be addressed. So a two year renovation will completely transform the building so that we can meet the needs of the community better and open up the whole lower level as a kind of living room for Liverpool. So the team there wanted to work in that way for years, but limited by their spaces. The other really exciting thing is that this point in time means that we can make Liverpool net zero, drawing on the water that surrounds the whole building, rather than old fashioned gas and electricity fired boilers. So there's a kind of ongoing modernisation, but what will characterise all the work that we do over the next five to 10 years is this sense of expansiveness, of us not knowing all the answers ourselves and holding all the cultural wealth ourselves, but distributing it and connecting to people.

- It'll be exciting to watch as it evolves. There's a question here that's very close to my heart and very close to some of the things that we want to look at. How does the Tate work to support small and remote galleries across the country? We've just recently announced sharing the national collection and at the moment, our Claude Monet's "Haystack" has helped the Tweed River Art Gallery increase its attendance figures since it was launched by 60%. So this is a question and an idea that I think is interesting to our audiences, particularly given that Australia has so much distance.

- Yeah, well, UK, much smaller country, but things have distributed very unevenly across the country. So over the last 10 years, we've built a network called the Plus Tate Group, not Tate Plus, but Plus, they lead rather than us. And there are now 55 galleries across the four nations of the UK, some in very remote locations like Stromness or Llandudno or others down in Cornwall. And they have privileged access to the collection. But the key thing I find, and I feel this very keenly because I came from a regional gallery to the national space, often those institutions know more than we do. They certainly know their local context more. So we've really tried to shift the balance of power so that the work that circulates through Plus Tate or is distributed through our Artist's Room, which is our touring program, does share the collection, but it's driven by the ideas and needs of those that really know the locality and that we have to be humble as the national institution in that context because we are big and powerful, but that means that we don't see in the same way as a small and more agile place would. So I think the really interesting thing is how much we learn as well as how much we share.

- I think the idea of the Tate being humble is such a dynamic thing to work with regional galleries across the country. We've got one more question and it's a question that I glanced at the screen and it put a smile on my face. It's the question that very few people ever ask. And so I'm gonna ask it of you, what is the most enjoyable part of your job?

- Well, the absolutely correct answer would be having, doing talks like this. And there are other aspects that I love though. For me, always, learning from artists and in the role that I have now, I don't get enough time to do that. And I'm happy to say that on the record. Every hour I've spent with an artist in my career has changed the way that I think, not just about their work, but about art in general and more often about the world in general. So I think we are lucky to be in roles where we're always learning from the artists we work with, the curatorial colleagues that we have a privilege of working with. And it's that creative learning aspect of my job that gives me the most satisfaction.

- What a beautiful way to finish tonight. I want to thank you for being so generous, so thoughtful, and actually inspiring us to think more broadly about what it means to visit, to run, to manage, and to inspire cultural institutions in the 21st century. I hope Betty would've been proud to be here tonight. I know I feel really proud to be able to share your vision with our audience here in the Fairfax Auditorium and our audience across Australia. Thank you very much for your support and please join me in thanking the extraordinary Maria Balshaw. Thank you.