Image: Canberra Museum and Gallery
Canberra Museum and Gallery is presenting ‘Public Impressions: Sidney Nolan in Popular Media’, an exhibition examining how magazines, photographs and publicity helped turn the Australian painter into one of the country’s most recognisable cultural figures. The exhibition is on view at the Canberra institution from 6 June to 13 September 2026.
Curated by Dr Kate Warren, Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University and a 2022 Research Fellow at the National Library of Australia, the exhibition focuses on the ways popular publications brought modern art and cultural discussion to broad Australian audiences.
The exhibition looks back to a period before television became the dominant form of popular media in Australia, when colourful magazines were common fixtures in homes, canteens, waiting rooms and coffee tables. Publications including The Australian Women’s Weekly, Walkabout, Australasian Post and Pix addressed different readerships, but each carried coverage of the arts as part of its editorial mix.
Rather than treating magazine coverage as a neutral record, ‘Public Impressions’ considers the varied strategies used to present contemporary art to the public. The exhibition’s material includes magazines, images and publicity associated with Nolan, showing how his work and public image were shaped for readers who may have encountered art primarily through mass-circulation print.
Nolan’s position as an expatriate living in London forms an important part of the exhibition’s context. Australian magazine coverage kept the artist visible to audiences at home, while international coverage contributed to his growing reputation beyond Australia. The exhibition links this circulation of images and stories to the formation of a broader sense of Australian national identity.
A featured image records Sidney Nolan in Pix Magazine on 25 August 1967. The photograph, taken by W. Croser, is held by the State Library of New South Wales. The exhibition is also part of Canberra Museum and Gallery’s wider Nolan-focused programming, which includes ‘Nolan50’, a year-long programme marking 50 years of Nolan’s cultural legacy.
The exhibition sits alongside ‘The Nolan Collection’, an iconic group of paintings made between 1945 and 1953 that Nolan gifted to the nation in 1974. A further presentation, ‘Dean Cross X Sidney Nolan: Two Heads’, is scheduled for the Nolan Gallery from 27 September 2026 to 27 June 2027. ‘Public Impressions: Sidney Nolan in Popular Media’ remains on view at Canberra Museum and Gallery until 13 September 2026.
