Julie Ewington is a writer, curator and broadcaster based in Sydney. An authority on contemporary Australian art, especially art by women, and contemporary art from Southeast Asia, she has held both academic and curatorial positions, always focusing on contemporary art. Her interests extend from feminism to cosmopolitanism, from installation to jewellery, from museum projects to cultural resistance.
Between 2001-14 Julie was Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Key achievements there included the 2005 retrospective The Art of Fiona Hall; the national surveys Contemporary Australia: Optimism (2008) and Contemporary Australia: Women (2012); and contributing to six editions of the Gallery’s acclaimed Asia-Pacific Triennial
In 2014, Julie received the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Award to honour her achievements as a curator, writer, and advocate for the visual arts.
Since 2014 Julie has written catalogue essays, and reviews for journals including The Monthly and Artforum. Major publications include monographs on Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014). In 2016 Julie curated The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver for TarraWarra Museum of Art, and was a member of the curatorium for Unfinished Business: Perpectives on art and feminism, which concluded at ACCA, Melbourne, in March 2018.
FEATURED PUBLICATIONS
'The Jewellery of Warwick Freeman', Owner's Manual 1995
‘Five Elements: An Abbreviated Account of Installation Art in Southeast Asia’ 1995
Contemporary Australia: Women 2012
Kirsten Coelho in Garland 2015
'The Value of Maturity: Anne Ferran, Judith Wright, Lindy Lee’, Feminist Perspectives on Art 2017
The Monthly - 2018 on the NGV Triennial
'Art Turns. World Turns' The first months at MACAN, Art Monthly, May 2018
‘Painting, Pleasure, Perversity’, in Gemma Smith: Found Ground 2018