In debt to Kiffy Rubbo’s creativity

A symposium on the work of Kiffy Rubbo will be held this month to honour the curator’s legacy and explore for the first time the major role she played in Australian visual culture.

Dr Janine Burke, an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, is co-ordinating the event.

“Kiffy gave me my first job curating ‘Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940’,” Dr Burke recalls. 

“I’d just graduated in art history from Melbourne University. She took a chance on me. She did that for many young artists and curators. Significant Australian artists such as Elizabeth Gower, Jill Orr, Domenico de Clario, Stelarc, Lyndal Jones and Howard Arkley all had early, ground-breaking shows at the George Paton Gallery, where Kiffy was active,” she says.

Under Rubbo’s leadership, the George Paton Gallery (formerly The Ewing) at the University of Melbourne became the first institutionally-supported experimental art space and a nationally-recognised venue for art, debate and engagement.

“With Meredith Rogers, who was the gallery’s assistant director from 1974 to 1979, Rubbo devised an innovative program presenting a wide range of art forms including performance, painting, sculpture, video, printmaking, film, installation and photography,” Dr Burke says.

Rubbo and Rogers also founded arts publications including Art Almanac in 1974 (still one of Australia’s top selling arts magazines) and Arts Melbourne in 1976. 

Rubbo also foregrounded women’s art by commissioning the landmark historical exhibitions ‘Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940’ (1975) and ‘Australian Women Photographers 1890-1950’ (1981).

She co-curated Australia’s first feminist art exhibition ‘A Room of One’s Own: Three Women Artists’ (1974) and she presented sometimes controversial feminist group shows such as ‘Experiments in Vitreous Enamel: Silk-Screened Portraits of Women’ (1976) and ‘Portrait of the Artist as Housewife: A Postal Event’ (1977).

“The first meeting of the Women’s Art Movement was held at the Gallery also its slide register, a compendium of contemporary women’s art, where it was accessible to curators and researchers at the Gallery,” Dr Burke says.

In 1980, after her innovative achievements in the 1970s, Rubbo took her own life. She was 36.

It has taken a long time for Rubbo’s reputation to gain the attention it is now receiving.

Her daughter, Bridie Carter – the highly-recognised Australian actress – will be speaking at the symposium in special recognition of her mother’s work.

“There is a terrible stigma associated with suicide,” Ms Carter says. “No one wants to talk about the person who’s gone so you lose them twice. You lose them, and you lose all the wonderful things about their life.

“This event is really thanks to Janine’s determination to set aside the personal tragedy and bring about the opportunity for Mum’s achievements to be talked about and celebrated openly and with the positivity they deserve,” she says.

Kiffy Rubbo’s obituary in The Age (Monday 10 November, 1980) read: “The particular quality marking her enterprises was a capacity to bring people together, observe them and see possibilities in creative situations.”

It has taken 40 years but she will be doing it again at this month’s symposium.

For speaker and program information, and to register visit: 

alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au

Admission is free but bookings are required as seating is limited.