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Joanna Mendelssohn

Joanna Mendelssohn

The Conversation

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Australian printmaker Ruth Faerber has died aged 102. She never stopped making art

In 1974, when a local Sydney newspaper wrote on the success of two local artists, they were introduced using their husband’s names. Ruth Faerber,...

30.11.2024 5

The Conversation

Joanna Mendelssohn

Welcome to Babel: new documentary charts the creation of painter Jiawei Shen’s three-storey magnum opus

When Jiawei Shen first came to Australia, he bought a copy of that great western ideological text, the Bible. The doctrine that had shaped his life...

28.11.2024 2

The Conversation

Joanna Mendelssohn

Vale Leon Paroissien: the first director of the Museum of Contemporary Art who shaped how Australians experience art

In 1975 when Gough Whitlam opened the Manet to Matisse exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which had come to Australia from the...

12.11.2024 10

The Conversation

Joanna Mendelssohn

Friday essay: crimes, redemption and rebellion – the truths told in 65,000 years of Australian art are essential for national healing

The third section of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is Truth. Without knowing the truth of the history of Australia’s Indigenous people, and...

17.10.2024 3

The Conversation

Joanna Mendelssohn

Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When finally makes sense of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Tank. It is worth the plane flight

The Nelson Packer Tank, that cavernous space at the very bottom of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Naala Badu building, has been waiting for art like...

24.09.2024 5

The Conversation

Joanna Mendelssohn

The stunning photographs of Australian artist Anne Zahalka: remembering the past and recording the present

The first work I saw by the Australian photo-media artist Anne Zahalka was her regendered version of Tom Roberts’ A Break Away! (1891). In...

18.08.2024 1

The Conversation

Joanna Mendelssohn

VCA graduate Kristina Ross set her novel at a ‘vicious, cutthroat’ famous drama school. She says she wrote it for young actors

Some time in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, 17-year-old Kristina Ross became “one of the youngest actors ever selected” to...

12.07.2024 1

The Conversation

Joanna Mendelssohn