About  

Published digitally, Art + Australia is a biannual open access art journal. Each issue orientates around a theme, inviting responses from emerging and established researchers, academics and artists. Accompanied by the Art + Australia Study Centre, we are forum for current, critical and cutting-edge discourse and research about contemporary art and its broader contexts.  

In 2015, Art + Australia was donated to the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne by then publisher and editor Eleanora Triguboff as a gift of the ARTAND Foundation.  

Art + Australia acknowledges the generous support of the Dr Harold Schenberg Bequest and the University of Melbourne.  

History  

Art + Australia is Australia’s longest running art journal. It is the successor to Art in Australia, a fine art magazine published by Sydney Ure Smith between 1916 and 1942—reborn as Art and Australia under Ure Smith’s son, Sam Ure Smith, in 1963. In its inaugural issue, art historian and founding editor Mervyn Horton described Art and Australia as:   

An answer to a need... This time has become when Australians should know why they go to exhibitions, give prizes and buy paintings.   

Across its sixty subsequent years, Art + Australia has passed through different hands, locations and iterations, witnessing critical moments in Australian and international art. Previous editors include Elwyn Lynn, Jennifer Phipps and Leon Paroissien, Dinah Dysart, Hannah Fink and Laura Murray Cree. As well as publishing writing about art, Art + Australia has collaborated with artists and designers to produce covers, Artist Editions and Art Projects.   

In 2014 Art + Australia launched its website, shifting focus to art book publication with Dott Publishing, an imprint of Art & Australia. In 2015, the journal was gifted to the Victorian College of Arts at the University of Melbourne and published print magazines under the editor-ship of Edward Colless alongside a series of books. Since 2022 it has existed as an exclusively digital publication, accompanied by the Art + Australia Study Centre. 

Acknowledgement of Country 

Art + Australia acknowledges that we live and work on the unceded lands of the people of the Kulin nations who have been and remain traditional owners of this land for tens of thousands of years and acknowledge and pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and emerging. 

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