So here it is, ready to invigorate the cityscape: the Sydney Modern Project. The transformed Art Gallery of New South Wales and the city are well placed to harmonise because they share fundamental qualities. Energetic, speculative and attuned to ever-adjusting contexts, the city and the new campus both project outward, creatively curious about everything that is coming over the horizon.
– Ross Gibson

The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney sits on Gadigal Country overlooking one of the world’s most beautiful harbours. With the completion of its Sydney Modern Project – encompassing a beautiful new building designed by award-winning Japanese architects SANAA and a unique art garden along with transformed displays of art across its campus – the Art Gallery stands at the forefront of an international movement to create museums for our times.

Like many other art museums, the Art Gallery was founded in an era when collecting ambitions were inseparable from a Eurocentric, colonialist worldview. Today, this 150-year-old institution is forging a cosmopolitan future inspired by its historical context, its location in Sydney and the diversity of its audiences, following the guiding principle of ‘From here. For all.’

In this important new book, director Michael Brand and colleagues from across the Art Gallery consider what is unique about presenting art from the perspective of Sydney and Australia, bringing to their work a consciousness of the past as a continuing presence and the future as an open possibility.

The fourteen chapters are preceded by a foreword by acclaimed academic, essayist and multimedia artist Ross Gibson who sets the scene, and an introduction by Michael Brand.

Edited by Michael Brand
With a foreword by Ross Gibson
Paperback
308 pages
24 x 16.5cm