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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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Dance like everyone’s watching
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Penelope Grist’s spirits soar with Lisa Tomasetti’s Dancers in the Streets series.
Betty Churcher
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The National Portrait Gallery mourns the loss of our colleague and friend Betty Churcher, AO.
Banksia and grevillea
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Portraits can render honour to remarkable men and women, but there are other ways.
Danger boy
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I didn’t ever meet the American artist Chris Burden but about 20 years ago I wrote to him. I was after the loan of some photographic prints of his most famous performance: he had arranged for a friend to fire a bullet so it would graze his arm.
Happy New Year
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This year (in March) we will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the formal establishment of the National Portrait Gallery. In the life of institutions, twenty years is not a long time.
Desert Island Discs
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I agonized over the choice of four songs to take with me to the ABC Studios for Alex Sloan’s Canberra 666 afternoon program, a sort of iteration of the old BBC Desert Island Discs.
Dempsey's people
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Those of you who are active in social media circles may be aware that through the past week I have unleashed a blitz on Facebook and Instagram in connection with our new winter exhibition Dempsey’s People: A Folio of British Street Portraits, 1824−1844.
The mystery of Enoch Arden
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Tennyson's Enoch Arden was inspired by a story that Thomas Woolner passed on to him – but whose story and of whom?
Remembering Ursula
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I first knew Dr. Hoff when in 1986, long after retiring from the National Gallery of Victoria, she taught a graduate seminar on Rembrandt.
The medallion
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In recent years I have become fascinated by the so-called Sydney Cove Medallion (1789), a work of art that bridges the 10,000-mile gap between the newly established penal settlement at Port Jackson and the beating heart of Enlightenment England.
Gotta catch 'em all
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Angus Trumble grabs his life jacket and rides the Pokémon GO tsunami.
A portrait of the artist by the artist
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Rowan McGinness asks: when is a self portrait not a self portrait?
Missing Persons
Thomas Woolner in Australia
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Desperately seeking Woolner medallions
Home is where the art is
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Tedi Bills on how social media in the age of COVID-19 has fanned the flames of our portrait fascination.
Of plague and portraits
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Corinna Cullen on the symbolic power of pandemic-related imagery over the ages.
The play’s the thing
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Penelope Grist charts an immersive path through Stuart Spence’s photography.