Shepparton Art Museum in northern Victoria about to open
The impressive new gallery in northern Victoria builds on a civic vision for art and culture in the nation’s fruit-growing region.
The new Shepparton Art Museum in northern Victoria is a high point on the landscape in more ways than one. Set near the Goulburn River, on a plain that is unremittingly flat, the five-storey gallery is the tallest building in town.
More significantly, the museum that opens on November 20 is the fulfilment of a long-held civic vision for the arts in a region historically better known for orchards and canneries.
“We wanted a destination building, and something that would be a beacon, a beautiful amenity, and create some civic place-making,” says Rebecca Coates, SAM artistic director and chief executive.
“It’s the tallest building in Shepparton now. It’s changing the aspiration and the landscape of Shepparton through architecture and good design.”
The $49m building designed by Melbourne firm Denton Corker Marshall is but one aspect of the new-look SAM. The museum’s collection is particularly strong on Indigenous art and ceramics, and will open with an exhibition program showcasing both.
An exhibition by Lin Onus – known for his meditative, almost mystical paintings of riverlands and water places – is said to be the first significant display of the Yorta Yorta artist on country.
As part of an overhaul of Shepparton’s cultural offering across the past decade, the museum was rebadged (it was formerly Shepparton Art Gallery), transferred from council control to a not-for-profit board, and now moved from the Civic Centre in town to a site next to Victoria Park Lake. It sits at the apex of an enviable network of regional galleries in the state, including those at Bendigo, Castlemaine, Geelong and Ballarat.
As Coates describes it, there has been significant community investment in the art gallery that was founded with a local collection in 1936. A forward-thinking town clerk had the good sense to ask celebrated artist John Longstaff, who had connections with the area, to advise the town on starting a collection.
Another catalyst, possibly the catalyst, for the new SAM gallery was the material and motivational support offered by philanthropists Carrillo and Ziyin Gantner. Along with a cash donation, they pledged to donate a substantial collection of Indigenous art to SAM, and the artworks valued at $3m were formally given earlier this year.
“(Gantner) said he would gift his collection to the Shepparton Art Museum on three conditions: you change the governance model, you build a new art museum, and you re-envisage what an arts and cultural space can be for a regional community,” Coates says. “Other people had ideas previously, but it was the right idea with the right people at the right time. It galvanised a renewed interest.”
Coates’s predecessor as director, Kirsten Paisley, worked with the council to develop a business case and feasibility study for the new building. Sensibly, the business case was made public and people had the opportunity to respond to it. It doesn’t always happen with major cultural developments that the rationale is made available for public scrutiny and discussion, but Coates says transparency and community investment were important.
“Not everyone is going to agree, but it’s about respecting and understanding your community,” she says.
“There’s a lot we can get right if we do it properly, there’s more we can all win. This is quite a big deal for a local council to have initiated and to see through. So if you use it as a best case and share the information – the architectural brief, the business case – that helps others to strengthen our sector.”
For the building project, SAM invited expressions of interest from architects and five shortlisted proposals were exhibited before DCM was selected by an expert jury. The firm’s previous cultural projects include the Melbourne Museum, extensions to the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
DCM’s design for the new SAM building effectively gives it four entrances, including a cafe, visitors centre, the Kaiela Arts gallery and studio, and the main public entry. Each of the building’s exterior walls has a different surface material, such as zinc and corten steel, and is L-shaped in a modern interpretation of a veranda. “We wanted the gallery to be a signal for Shepparton, a signal of confidence in culture, and that Shepparton was a place to come to,” DCM founding director John Denton says.
“Country towns always have verandas for people to stand under when it’s sunny or rainy – it’s a country town thing. Our idea was to create these planes that then turn out horizontally to form a veranda on each edge, but to give them a different character and give them different heights.”
Denton says the firm had to address potential problems with the site. While SAM sits in a parkland setting and on the road into town, the area is a flood plain.
Denton says this limited the size of the building’s footprint and it was decided to make the structure taller rather than wider. The loading dock and utilities are hidden in a hill next to the building. The new building has been designed with airconditioning and climate controls that Denton says meet international standards.
“The one thing that country galleries like this had not been able to do was borrow significant artworks, whether it be from the National Gallery of Victoria or from overseas, because they didn’t have the airconditioning, the humidity controls and the lighting to allow them to put those sort of things on,” he says.
“Fundamental to it is that we were creating an art gallery which meets those standards. It means they can offer much better experiences for people coming to the gallery.”
Visitors will come through the revolving door and encounter a triple-height foyer area. A broad set of stairs leads people up into the exhibition areas. Artworks are installed throughout the building – including into the floor – as well as in the gallery spaces.
“You’ll go to see exhibitions, but you’ll also be surrounded by great art when you get a cup of coffee,” Coates says.
“While the building is quite strong and austere from the outside, on the inside there is a great interrelationship between the outside and the inside worlds – there is a lot of natural light, and views out and views in. It’s a very human scale when you walk in, but there is a degree of performance, and playfulness, and being seen, and being part of activities and life.”
The opening exhibition program puts the spotlight on SAM’s collecting areas. Coates and curator Shelley McSpedden have put together an exhibition called Flow: Stories of River, Earth and Sky that draws on the work of 60 artists in the collection. It seeks to open a series of conversations between Western artists such as Eugene von Guerard and Arthur Streeton with contemporary and Indigenous artists including Sally Gabori, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Yhonnie Scarce.
The substantial ceramics collection at SAM is foregrounded in an exhibition called Brown Pots, and the work of contemporary artists including Amrita Hepi, Maree Clarke, Louisa Bufardeci and Onus is explored in separate displays.
The project has been supported by three tiers of government and philanthropic contributions. Coates says the building doubles the floor area of the gallery’s previous premises and gives people a cultural place to visit that isn’t where they pay their council rates. The new SAM, she adds, builds on the civic motivations that guided the founding of the Shepparton art collection in 1936.
“This was seen as a place to live and work, and there was an aspiration to be a dynamic regional centre,” she says. “There was a very strong desire for the things you needed for a well-lived life: to be connected, to feel a sense of place, and to have a reflection of your culture.”
Brown’s crusade to put Australia’s first diva on a pedestal
You’ve probably never heard of her, but Amy Sherwin was Australia’s first diva, paving the way for Nellie Melba. The Weekend Australian can provide first glimpse of a long-overdue art work that will finally honour ‘the nightingale of Tasmania’.
When the time seems rite for renewal
Paris-based artist Angelica Mesiti’s seven-channel video and sound installation is centred around the idea of seasonal renewal in a changing world.