Past Appeals

Funds raised in 2023 to support the important process of digitising AGWA's Collection will mean that the entire State Art Collection will soon be available for access online. This ensures that Australians in regional and remote areas, students, families, researchers, and visitors around the world have the opportunity to discover, experience and enjoy art.

This year, our focus was on historical and modern works and continuing to build on the representation of women artists within our holdings of work from these periods. With your support, the Gallery acquired the work The charming ladies c1956 by senior Australian artist Helen Maudsley. This is the first work by Maudsley to enter the Gallery’s collection and its acquisition assisted in addressing a critical gap of works by senior Australian women artists.

The AGWA Foundation 2021 Annual Appeal raised funds to support our landmark program Creative Encounters: Arts & Dementia at AGWA. This Gallery based program, developed in collaboration with dementia support services, will bring people living with dementia and their carers to the fore, and highlight the important role of the arts for wellbeing.

An extension of the AGWA Foundation Stimulus Package, the Emerging Artist Acquisition Appeal enabled AGWA supporters to play a role in contributing to the careers of emerging artists not yet represented in the AGWA Collection.

To help support WA’s arts and culture recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic’s drastic economic impact, the AGWA Foundation funded a sector-leading stimulus package for Western Australian artists, worth $1.5 million.

This unprecedented initiative provided support for living Western Australian artists represented in the State Art Collection and Aboriginal art centres across the State, made possible through the generous support of AGWA Foundation donors.

Postmodern Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun artist artist Christopher Pease appropriates early colonial images to reframe colonial history and race relations in startling ways. His acclaimed Minang Boodjar series subverts the well-known 1834 colour print Panoramic View of King George's Sound, Part of the Colony of Swan River, from drawings by Lieutenant Robert Dale. In Dale’s image, black and white harmoniously coexist in a romanticised landscape. But we now know that these bucolic scenes hid the tragic violence of the frontier wars.

This ability to acquire works has a profound impact not only on the Collection but also on the vitality of the cultural sector in Western Australia. Since 2008 the Foundation’s TomorrowFund has enabled the acquisition of 417 new works for the State Art Collection, and that number will continue to grow.

The TomorrowFund is significantly enriching the State Collection’s holding of contemporary art by quality, breadth, and number, and in turn, enriching the experiences of Western Australians and visitors to the state by providing outstanding works of art by the country’s and world’s finest contemporary artists.