About the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery

The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery is one of Australia’s premier university art museums, with a wide ranging and challenging program of exhibitions, public programs, events and publications. The Gallery’s programs endeavour to connect its audiences with ideas and experiences of the visual arts and culture, in ways that are simultaneously scholarly and engaging.

The Gallery’s audiences include the University community, the students, staff and alumni of the University of Western Australia (in keeping with the Gallery’s broad educational mission), and to communities well beyond its borders, locally, nationally and internationally. The Gallery is part of the UWA’s Community Relations division.

The Gallery building, completed in 1990, was the first dedicated, purpose built art museum building in an Australian university, and it remains one of the largest and most attractive. The building was constructed very largely with funds raised from alumni, public and corporate donations. Located on the beautiful grounds of the University of Western Australia, the Gallery has three major exhibition spaces, extensive public areas, and high quality collection storage.

Personal+Particular: Private collections and contemporary art, 27 October–15 December 2002

The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery has a strong exhibition history, producing substantial exhibitions of Australian art, both contemporary and historical, working with individual artists and groups, and presenting important touring exhibitions since its inception, and through its predecessor, the Undercroft Gallery, since the early 1970s.

Gallery staff are responsible for the care and development of the UWA Art Collection, a nationally significant collection of Australian modern and contemporary art. From its beginnings collecting activity has focused on art of the moment, and on acquiring new and innovative art, whether by gift or purchase. The earliest acquisitions for the Art Collection were made in the late 1920s, and it has grown with substantial support from private collectors, significant bequests, and, at times, public funding to be the major public collection, outside the state gallery, in Western Australia.