Sydney’s Art Month will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2019.
Precinct nights, after parties, workshops and gallery walks are just some of the fun and exciting ways you can explore Art Month, with over 100 gallery spaces participating in the festival.
“I like to think of Art Month as an opportunity to shine light on things that do happen year-round basically. To generate a bit of a critical mass that will hopefully encourage people to engage with the spaces and artists after Art Month,” Artistic Director for Art Month, Kate Britton says.
Celebrating the world of local contemporary art, Art Month’s programme has its four major precinct nights each Thursday of the month. Attracting many locals, these nights are said to be the biggest events of the Art Month, with thousands attending for the gallery walks and the big after parties too.
Although, the precinct nights are also accommodative to children, as the nights start off slow and informative with the gallery walk from 6pm-8pm, leaving the partying for later in the night.
“One of the things I really love about the precinct nights is that they're a night time activity that's not centred around alcohol and licensed venues. The galleries are really child-friendly and it's about throwing open the doors,” Kate says.
Other child-friendly activities include workshops at the Pine Street Creative Arts venue, as well as many other child-friendly and youth-focused activities available during the course of the festival.
If you aren’t excited about loud activities and masses of people, Art Month still has many quieter activities, including talk panels and more intimate gallery walks on Saturday mornings.
Image © Document Photography
“One thing I've been really excited for is that we have started to focus back on the talks, the tours and the finer grain programmes, which is not necessarily a new initiative, but was a really important part of Art Month at its very beginning which grew from the community of the smaller gallery spaces at quite a grass roots level,” Kate explains.
“The tenth year [of the festival] was an opportunity to look back on where [Art Month] had come from and re-invigorate the finer grain experience – with the chance to really go on a smaller tour and engage one-on-one with gallerists, and ask those kinds of questions you have about how to buy art or what to collect.”
“Critical talks [also] give that insight and demystify art and encourage people to give it a go.”
With so many exciting things planned on the programme, Kate really suggests catching the APY Gallery (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Gallery), which showcases emerging artists from the APY Lands.
Other events on the programme that support great artists include the Killin’ It Ceramic Studio exhibition, which supports artists with disability, and Kate Britton’s own exhibition which shares work from early career artists who do not have gallery representation or work outside of a commercial model.
If you’re interested in supporting the local artists, you can also purchase artwork directly from artists at the Art Month artist fair, which will also act like a live studio showing audiences the behind-the-scenes of their creations.
“There’s pretty much something for everyone.” Kate says.
