Sydney’s art world unites

Under the Aegis by Jonathan Jones (installation view).  

A unique collaboration between the various elements which make up Sydney’s visual arts sector, Art Month Sydney is a month-long celebration of Sydney’s vibrant and vital visual arts scene.

Exhibitions, studio tours and special events – such as behind-the-scenes explorations of gallery stockrooms and private and corporate collections – will open up the sometimes cloistered world of the visual arts to the general public, with the program designed to appeal to everyone from the layman to the experienced collector.

Dr Dick Quan, an avid contemporary art collector and Sydney medical practitioner, and a Board member of Arts Month Sydney, believes the event symbolises the symbiosis of the city’s art scene.

“Art Month Sydney represents the coming together of that magic triangle in art creation – the artist, the gallery or dealer who supports them and the collectors and institutions who buy the work,” Quan says.

“More artwork is bought and sold in Sydney than in any other city in Australia. It is appropriate then that Sydney has an event such as Art Month Sydney which celebrates our artistic community at all levels – from the making of the work, to the presenting and collecting, which in turn supports artists to create new work.”

As so many good ideas do, the seeds of Art Month Sydney were sown over a coffee between gallerist Vasili Kaliman, the owner of Kaliman Gallery in Paddington, and art dealer Michael Reid of Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay.

“The idea [for Art Month] came about last year because we were in the midst of a downturn in the economy and the galleries had been hit very, very hard,” Vasili Kaliman tells Arts Hub.

“Michael and I thought: what can we do to move forward as an industry as a whole? That’s in a nutshell how the idea came about; and also we wanted to keep ourselves busy. In the middle of a recession, when phone calls weren’t coming through and emails weren’t coming through, we thought ‘we’re going to make something happen’.

“We’re of two different generations, and we come from two very different backgrounds, but in spite of all the differences we have a commonality, which is an interest in the future of our industry.”

The inaugural Art Month Sydney features more than 70 of Sydney’s leading commercial galleries, artist-run initiatives, public art institutions and auction houses, while the program sees the spotlight shine on a different arts precinct each week throughout March.

“Geographically, Sydney is not centralized at all. So what that means is, I live in Paddington, and as the crow flies Redfern’s not too far away, but getting there is enormously difficult. And also, what’s actually happened is that the art scene here in the ‘90s was very focused on the Eastern suburbs, on Paddington, but now it’s really broadened out and there are clusters of galleries in Redfern, there are clusters of galleries in Waterloo and clusters of galleries Surry Hills and Paddington,” Kaliman says.

“And because of what I said before about the geographic nature of Sydney, and because it’s all higgledy-piggledy, it’s quite difficult to get from one area to another. So we thought, let’s break things up into precincts and let’s make each week a focus area so people don’t have to trudge from Surry Hills or Paddington to Redfern. We can focus on one area and get people into one area, because there’s a lot to do in each area.”

Other features of Art Month Sydney include a detailed program of exhibitions, artists floor talks, lectures on topics such as building a collection and creative collaborations, and a special ‘speed dating’ event for artists, allowing them to pitch their works to gallery owners and art dealers.

The festival will also see artworks spilling out of the galleries and institutions and into the streets – specifically, into shop windows of businesses and residences across the city.

While commercial galleries such as Kaliman’s own gallery and Anna Schwartz Gallery have understandably embraced Art Month – it will obviously introduce more potential buyers to their businesses – the festival has also been welcomed by Sydney’s artist-run initiatives, such as Chalkhorse, Fraser Studios and Firstdraft.

Grace Archibald is a co-director of Firstdraft, a non-profit gallery run on a voluntary basis by a group of practising artists. It is one of the longest running and most successful artist-run initiatives in Australia, having been operating for over 21 years.

She and her co-directors have embraced the opportunity to participate in Art Month Sydney.

“We give emerging artists and curators an affordable space in which to exhibit their works, and provide a space that’s accessible for the general public as well. Art Month is supporting artists of all ilks, and lets a broader audience know what artist-run initiatives do and the sort of work we exhibit,” Archibald says.

The partnership between businesses with a commercial imperative and the edgier, creatively-driven world of artist-run spaces reflects the interconnected nature of the art world, Vasili Kaliman explains.

“The art world is a vast, interdependent ecosystem. Artist-run galleries are where artists tend to show when they’re fresh out of art school … and they learn professional skills, how to deliver exhibitions, how to hang shows … and the commercial galleries tend to pluck artists out of these sorts of spaces. So what actually happens is artists migrate to commercial representation,” he says.

“And then of course we’ve got public art museums like Artspace and the MCA involved, and what happens is that artists who show in commercial galleries migrate to show in museums, either in survey shows or big group shows at the Biennale … and we’ve also got the auction houses involved. And some artists garner a very strong reputation in the marketplace, they become very collectable, and then their work appears in the auction rooms – like Del Kathryn Barton for example.

“So the way I see it is that even though these entities are vastly different in terms of the audiences they cater towards, there’s a thread that runs through all of them, I think.”

Art Month Sydney, it seems, is the latest tapestry to be woven from that thread.