Horsham Regional Art Gallery (HRAG) is proud to announce our first major exhibition of 2024, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).

Know My Name: Australian Women Artists tells a new story of Australian art. Looking to moments in which women create new forms of art and cultural commentary, the exhibition suggests new histories by highlighting creative and intellectual relationships between artists through time.

Know My Name is part of an ongoing series of gender equality initiatives by the National Gallery of Australia to increase representation of women artists who have often been omitted from published histories and public collections. It draws from an exhibition held at the National Gallery between 2020 and 2022 which was among the most comprehensive presentations of art by women assembled in Australia to date.

The exhibition features more than 60 works from women artists including Margaret Preston, Janet Cumbrae-Stewart and Emily Kam Kngwarray, providing visitors with an opportunity to experience the art and stories behind some of the country’s most influential women artists.

“We are beyond excited to bring an exhibition of such high calibre and cultural importance to our region and community,” Gallery Director Lauren Larkins said.

“Know My Name is an exhibition dedicated to celebrating and highlighting the contribution women artists have made to our culture – we are going back through the history books, reinserting their names into art history.”

Know My Name: Australian Women Artists will be displayed in our ***name of space i.e Handbury*** Gallery space from March 2, 2024. The opening of the exhibition will be held the day prior- March 1- from 5.30pm. An intimate tour of the exhibition will take place at 4.30pm before the opening celebrations with Deidre Cannon, Assistant Curator, Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia.

Drawing inspiration from the exhibition, HRAG is dedicating all our exhibition spaces to celebrating art created by women. These exhibitions include Barengi Gadjin Land Counxil Wotjobaluk women’s exhibition Don’t Define Me, community artist Kathryn Ellen Wilson’s Faces of Balmoral, and Australian Female Photographers from our Mack Jost private collection.

“One hundred years ago art museums were seen as sanctified spaces for art from the past; repositories of recognised greatness,” Writer, broadcaster and curator Julie Ewington stated in a previous essay on the exhibition for the NGA.

“That (recognised greatness) was almost entirely gender-specific: the great artists of the past were male, or so went conventional wisdom.

“Today those certainties have been swept away; society has changed profoundly in the past 50 years and women have been claiming their place in every area of cultural life.”

Know My Name will be displayed in our Gallery from March 2 until May 19. Exhibition Dates: 2 March 2024 – 19 May 2024 

This article appeared in the Nhill Free Press & Kaniva Times, 13 March 2024.