Cut-out-and-keep: magazines and the popularisation of Australian art in the 1950s and 1960s

Join Dr Kate Warren as she presents her 2022 National Library Fellowship research into mid-century Australian magazines and their engagement with the visual arts.

Australian popular magazines of the mid-century era frequently covered, wrote about, and supported Australian artists, spanning modes of engagement that ranged from the educational to the sensational.

This presentation will focus on how magazines appealed to audience engagement through their materiality and their use of developing printing technologies. Artwork reproductions boomed during this time, and magazines actively encouraged their readers to materially intervene in their publications: for example, by cutting out articles and reproductions to be framed, scrapbooked and inserted into the personal domestic spaces that these magazines also helped to construct and define. As such, magazines sought to influence broader social ideas around the popularisation and perceived value of Australian art and culture.

Entry is free to this event but bookings are essential.

For those unable to make it to Canberra for the event, it will be livestreamed online via the Library's Facebook page. No bookings are required to watch the online stream.

Dr Kate Warren is a 2022 National Library of Australia Fellow.

About Dr Kate Warren

Dr Kate Warren is a Lecturer of Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University. Her research explores the various ways that the visual arts in Australia intersect with broader popular culture, including television, film, magazines and the news media. Her current project, to which her National Library Fellowship contributes, explores the histories of how the arts have been covered and represented across the popular press from the mid-twentieth century to today.