“Place” is central to much of the important work that happens on or around rivers, yet the term is one of the most commonly used and least thought-about words we know. Shanai Matteson has recently written from her perspective as part of the public/community arts collaborative Works Progress about place, about the vexed and rewarding relationships to and with places, about language, and about the complexities of being fully “here.”
For the past century, the curator has been the deciding factor in what is shown by museums and galleries, reassuring audiences of the importance of what they are seeing. While acknowledging other commercial and audience drivers, the centrality of curatorial decision-making has been sacrosanct.
But when the curatorial team from the Art Gallery of Western Australia embarked on an epic quest to document the art of the Kimberley region in the state’s north west, they abandoned this idea of a single authorial voice in favor of a new model of partnership and exchange.