I have spent more than three decades working with artists and communities both in and outside gallery contexts. I find this work profoundly invigorating and relevant. However, I have seen so many awful murals, ceramic projects and the like, made in the name of community art that the term is anathema to me. Since I started at Arts & Cultural Exchange (ACE) in 2020, I use the term community arts (note the plural).
Community art in Australia has a distinguished history. Responding to political action, and ongoing demand for social and cultural change, community-based artistic practice – known variously as community art, community cultural development, and community art and cultural development – has continued to develop from the late 1960s through to the present day. The 1970s saw the establishment of seminal organisations that still thrive today: Footscray Community Arts Centre (Melbourne, 1974), Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras (1978), Flying Fruit Fly Circus (Albury-Wodonga, 1979), Garage Graphix (Blacktown, 1981) and ACE, established in 1982 as the Holdroyd Information Van.
At the heart of this maelstrom was the
