Bree Pickering,currently director of the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA),takes on the role next month following the resignation of Karen Quinlan,who left in September to become chief executive of Arts Centre Melbourne.
Declaring she was both thrilled and honoured by the appointment,Pickering said she aimed to make the NPG a must-visit destination for every visitor to Canberra.
New National Portrait Gallery boss Bree Pickering.Mark Mohell
“I want it to be that when you go to Canberra,you go to the National Portrait Gallery,” she said. “I want it to be one of the things that you just do. I’d like to expand its digital reach and its engagement with galleries across the country as well.”
Pickering took over the reins at MAMA soon after the gallery reopened in 2015 following a $10.5 million facelift. She has been credited with much of the museum’s subsequent success both in terms of visitor numbers and forging closer ties with the surrounding community.
In an address last year,Pickering gave some insight into her philosophy on the role of art institutions.
“I actually think that art galleries define themselves through rupture and change even while they present as stable anchor points,as places we go to for comfort,hope,beauty,escape and overall connection with the human experience,” she said in the speech.
And while she said radical change was not on her agenda for NPG,the institution had to engage with everything happening around it.
“Our cultural institutions must be agile and must respond to current circumstances,” she said. “But most importantly,I think they must give people what they want. Rather than being a top-down,‘This is what you’ll get from us,because we’re the experts’ experience,it’s got to be a more relational experience.”
She pointed to the NPG’s upcoming show,Portrait23:Identity,which has invited artists to “stretch,push,resist and transcend portraiture’s conventional restraints”.
Before her role at MAMA,Pickering worked for former US ambassador Kim Beazley at the Australian embassy in Washington,managing the cultural program there.
“It was an excellent experience,working in art but essentially outside the[art] sector,” she said.
Pickering said she would continue to pursue links with overseas galleries,particularly considering the NPG’s recent success with its blockbuster showShakespeare to Winehouse,loaned from London’s National Portrait Gallery.
“I think it’s really important that a national gallery is in conversation with the international art ecology,” she said. “[But] I’d really love to see people coming to the gallery to see Australian work with the intensity that sometimes they will approach international work.”
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