The Visual Arts Panel (VAP) provides advice on Council’s Art and Heritage Collection and public art.
Yarra City Council inherited a range of indoor and outdoor artworks and cultural artifacts when the Cities of Collingwood, Richmond and Fitzroy amalgamated in 1994. Council recognises the inherent importance of local cultural heritage and accepts responsibility as custodian for all collection items documenting the City’s unique history and people. Since this time the Collection has continued to grow through acquisitions and donations, particularly the Contemporary Fine Art collection. Council will acquire, collect, preserve, research, document, exhibit, interpret and make accessible to the public the original artworks, objects and information which forms the Yarra City Council Art & Heritage Collection.
The City of Yarra Collection Management Policy guides all decisions related to Council’s management of the Collection and role as cultural custodian of this Collection.
Public art is a growing and changing form of contemporary art that presents a range of opportunities and challenges for Council. Public art may be commissioned and produced by various means including by Council, community groups, artists and private developers. Council’s first Public Art Policy 2015-20 and Guidelines for Public Art in Private Development in Yarra were adopted on Tuesday 3 March 2015.
Council is advised on cultural matters by the Yarra Arts Advisory Committee (YAARTS). The Visual Arts Panel (VAP) is a working group of YAARTS. The Panel provides a formal mechanism for Council to seek specialist advice as required on matters related to the management of the Collection and public art.
Visual Arts Panel Membership
Yarra Councillors Edward Crossland (Deputy Mayor) and Stephen Jolly are members of the panel.
Members for the 2021-2023 term are:
Ry Haskings
Dr Ry Haskings is a practising artist, an educator, and an arts manager with collections management experience. Ry has an impressive record of exhibitions, publications, presentations at forums and has won many honours and prizes. Ry has run artist run spaces, including TCB Gallery and Conners Conners at Fitzroy Town Hall. Ry works in Yarra.
Carolyn Lewens
Carolyn Lewens is an artist and curator working solo and collaboratively to produce complex ensembles of image, sound and text. She investigates the properties and metaphors of light, and the mysteries of shadows, often producing experimental works. Her cameraless photographs are a mix of the literal and the phenomenal, problematising the digital through the uncanny of the analogue.
Probing cultural and scientific explanations of nature and more recently, the universe; playing with creative ambiguities of the photogram process, mobile sculptures and installation, her works broadly canvass ideas at work in culture and science, with a focus on ecologies of light, water and life. Her images are cyanotypes – blueprints, “plans for future reference.” As such they deal with issues of art and science - climate change, pollution, over-fishing, questioning what it means to be alive, and speculating on what might exist down in the oceanic depths or out in deep space. More recent forays into cosmic realms with her current fellowship at Swinburne University’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, has brought questions of the scientific interpretation of light and darkness, movement and shadows to the fore.
Clare Leporati
Clare Leporati is an arts manager with public art, artist residency and collections management experience. She is the Visual and Public Art Curator for Maribyrnong City Council. Clare lives in Yarra.
Larissa Hjorth
Larissa Hjorth is a Distinguished Professor, creative practitioner, digital ethnographer in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University, Naarm. Hjorth has two decades experience working in cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, collaborative projects exploring the social life (death and afterlife) of mobile media. Hjorth has occupied research leadership roles for a decade and is currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2023-2027) exploring the cultural perceptions of grief in media as well as first CI on an Australian Council Research Discovery on Ageing in and through Data and Linkage with ACMI and AGaMA on social digital museum futures.