Canberra's Portrait Gallery: Faces of Australia in the Nation's Capital

The National Portrait Gallery of Australia, the institution on King Edward Terrace in Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle that holds and presents the portraits of the Australians who have shaped the nation's history, culture, science, and sport, provides the human dimension to Canberra's suite of national cultural institutions by making the history and the achievement of Australian public life visible through the faces of the people who created it. The gallery's collection of paintings, photographs, sculptures, and the digital portraits that document the range of the Australian experience creates the most democratic of the national museum narratives, one in which the athlete and the artist sit alongside the prime minister and the general in the shared recognition that the gallery's acquisitions policy extends to the full spectrum of Australian achievement.

The permanent collection's highlights, from the colonial portraits of the founding figures and the nineteenth century settlers to the contemporary photographic portraits of the living Australians whose achievements and whose presence in the national life the gallery documents in real time, provide the visual history of the Australian faces that the gallery's collecting and the commissioning programs create across the full span of the Australian experience. The gallery's portrait commission program, engaging the leading Australian portrait painters to create the new works for the collection that document the significant Australians of the current era, sustains the living portrait tradition that the gallery's historical collection celebrates as the continuing practice of the portrait as the historical document.

The Archibald Prize touring exhibition, the most visited and most debated annual portrait competition in Australia whose Canberra showing provides the National Portrait Gallery with the audience and the controversy that the Archibald's combination of the celebrity subject and the critical standard generates each year when the touring show arrives in the capital after its Sydney showing, provides the gallery's most popular annual exhibition and the occasion for the community engagement with the questions of portrait aesthetics and the representation of significant Australians that the Archibald uniquely generates in the public conversation about what the portrait is and who deserves to be painted.

The gallery's education programs, including the schools programs that use the portrait collection as the entry point to the histories of the Australians the portraits document and the community programs that engage the adult visitor in the stories that the portraits tell about the people and the periods they represent, provide the education function that the national cultural institution in the capital is positioned to provide for the school groups from across Australia and the community learners who visit Canberra for the concentration of the national cultural resources that the Parliamentary Triangle's institutions offer. The portrait as biography, the story of a life distilled into the aesthetic object that the artist creates from the encounter with the subject, provides the most accessible form of history education that the museum format can deliver.

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