This collection contains correspondence, financial records, budget statements, press clippings, catalogues, exhibition briefs and proposals. Also included arecouncil meeting minutes relating to the development of local and overseas exhibitions in Australia during the 1970s. Material has been processed by original order to follow best archival practice.
List of galleries and exhibitions under Associated Content and Box Listing, respectively.
Key Names
Correspondents include William Warner, Pat Sabine, Ron Radford, James Mollison, Edmund Capon, Bernice Murphy,David Thomas, Brett Rogers, Jim Berry, J. Stephen, Edmund Capon, Raoul Mellish, Gil Docking, Deirdre McKeown, Diana Ashcroft-Johnson, Janet Parfenovics, Betty Burnham, Susan Abasa, John Wade, Bettina MacAulay, Dinah McLeod, Rod Anderson, Clytie Jessop, John A. McPhee, Tim Sanney, Irene McVey, Gael Newton, David Williams, Kenneth Hood, Rod Rudder, Catherine Fulton, Ken Pope, Forbes Laing and Eric Rowlison.
Administrative Information
Access
Contact the National Gallery of Australia Research Library reference desk librarians. Phone +61 2 6240 6530
Email rlr@nga.gov.au
Provenance
The papers were deposited with the Research Libraryfrom the AGDC’s Sydney offices in the late 1980s.
Preferred Citation Note
MS 55 Papers of The Australian Gallery Directors’ Council[description and date of item],[Box number: folder number], National Gallery of Australia Research Library Archives, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Biographical Note
The Australian Gallery Director’s Council (AGDC) was a voluntarily constituted organisation of the directors of fifty-three public galleries and art museums in Australia. It was designed for the co-operative management of touring exhibitions in Australia’s public galleries and museums. The AGDC secretariat was founded in 1975.
Associated Content
Subject
The collection documents a particular period in Australian art history during the 1970s, in relation to the exhibition history of Australian state and regional galleries, under the auspices of the newly established Australian National Gallery. The papers also document the role of the Visual Arts Board which is more comprehensively covered in MS 50 Papers of Fred Williams (he was a member of the Visual Arts Board).
In relation to the Research Library’s archival collections, AGDC overlaps with a number of organisational papers, particularly the MS 49 Papers of the Print Council of Australia whose records cover a similar period. There are also some connections with MS1Papers of James Mollison, the then-named Australian National Gallery’s director from the late 1970s until 1989,MS 38 Papers of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand and MS 37 The Papers of the Australian Centre for Photography. All were involved with the AGDC activities as well as those of the Visual Arts Board who co-sponsored many of the exhibitions with AGDC. This is documented in MS 50 Papers of Fred Williams: official roles and responsibilities in some way and the Australian Centre for Photography was a venue for a number of the travelling exhibitions discussed in the AGDC records.
Numerous artists and galleries are represented in the Art &Artist Filesheld in the Research Library.
Relationship to the National Gallery of Australia Collection
A number of artists, whose exhibitions are represented by material in this collection, have works of art in the national collection, including Joy Hester, Paul Jenkins, Donald Friend, John Glover, Hugh Ramsay, Guy Grey-Smith, Roger Kemp, Jean Arp, Diane Arbus, David Hockney, Hans Heysen, John Baldessari, John Olsen and Margaret Preston.
MS 55
