Highlights
Recent Acquisitions
Artworks recently acquired into the Mackay Regional Council Art Collection from 2022 - 2024.
Mackay Connections
Works by artists who have links to the Mackay region and culture through their life and artwork.
Contemporary Indigenous
Mackay Regional Council collects works of art by established and emerging contemporary Australian Indigenous artists, exploring issues pertaining to First Nations peoples.
Past Winners, Libris Awards, National Artists' Book Prize
The Libris Awards are Artspace Mackay's biennial art prize celebrating the artists' book medium. This page shows a selection of highlighted winning works that have been acquired since the inaugural awards in 2002.
In Bloom, an Artspace Mackay exhibition (2023)
In Bloom showcases twenty years of growth of Artspace Mackay, focusing on Australian visual culture via botanical imagery. Through a lens of investigation, the way floral imagery is used by artists to convey and at times interrogate a range of issues – from the imagined utopia of life in the tropics to First Nations connection to country and culture is considered. Work from the Mackay Regional Council Art Collection and associated programs, including a new major birthday commission are featured in this celebratory exhibition.
Great Australian Hoist, an Artspace Mackay exhibition (2023)
Great Australian Hoist considers the way contemporary artists engage with the myth of Australiana. This playful compilation of work from the Mackay Regional Council Art Collection reconsiders early twentieth century iconographies that associated native flora, fauna and other built icons with distinctly European viewpoints, prompting a variety of conversations about the history, relevance and meaning of Australiana today.
Glen Skien: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, an Artspace Mackay exhibition (2023)
Whilst living in Mackay in the mid-2000s, print and artist book maker Glen Skien became interested in the Australian play ‘Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’ which debuted for the first time in Melbourne in 1955. Presented in the foyer gallery, Skien’s series of the same name is a masterful rendition of Ray Lawler’s play, which was considered by many as the first significant Australian theatre production depicting everyday life. In a series of twelve etchings Skien re-presents this iconic text in pictorial form.
A Changing Ecology, an Artspace Mackay exhibition (2021)
A selection of works from 'A Changing Ecology' displayed at Artspace Mackay in 2021. This exhibition draws from art and heritage collection items that recognise a visual legacy devoted to Australia's changing ecology since colonisation.