Gallery history

Located in the heart of Nowra NSW, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery was established in 2003 on the site of a former TAFE building where it was originally known as the Shoalhaven City Arts Centre. The building was refurbished by Shoalhaven City Council with funding support from NSW Ministry of the Arts and the Australian Government Regional Partnership Program. It was officially opened 28 February 2004 by Mayor, Councillor Greg Watson, accompanied by Senator Rod Kemp, Federal Minister for the Arts, and Councillor John Anderson, Chairperson of Shoalhaven Arts Board and Assistant Deputy Mayor.

Shoalhaven Regional Gallery has a proud history of supporting local artists and connecting with the community and has several annual exhibitions for local artists within its program. Anna Lawrenson and Chiara O’Reilly recently conducted research on the role Shoalhaven Regional Gallery for an article in Humanities Research, 2024. They write that the gallery "attracts a considerable local audience and has a clear focus on responding to their needs through a changing exhibition program that sees it representing ‘global issues with a Shoalhaven lens’. This hyperlocal focus and approach is an asset for the institution and the community, which is thus empowered to experience the world differently.'

Their article analyses the role that institutions like Shoalhaven Regional Gallery can play in bringing the community together, especially during times of crisis. As they explain "on the one-year anniversary of the Black Summer fires, the gallery staged Wonder + Dread: Art in a Land of Weather Extremes—a major exhibition, scheduled during the prime summer slot, which situated weather extremes as integral to the region and Australian experience. The show featured works from 1816 to the present, illustrating, as curator Danielle Robson noted, how ‘weather extremes are a defining feature of life in the Shoalhaven’. This was echoed by Bronwyn Coulston, gallery director, who saw the show and its associated programs as a way to situate the recent fires within a continuum of extreme weather events, providing a space of reflection and hope for a community dealing with trauma. 

In 2024 Shoalhaven Regional Gallery became the temporary home to Barnett Newman’s sculpture, Broken obelisk. This globally acclaimed work is the only sculpture in Australia by the American artist and will be residing in the forecourt of Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Nowra, for the next five years, on loan from the National Gallery in Canberra as part of the ‘Sharing the National Collection’ initiative. This gravity-defying work is considered a masterpiece of human engineering and is one of four versions in existence. An inverted obelisk—a four-sided tapering monument from Ancient Egypt—is inserted upside down into a pyramid, another Egyptian form. This sculpture was created during the upheaval of the American civil rights movements of the 1960s and has been interpreted as a critique of institutions, monuments, and their power.

Image:
Barnett Newman
Broken Obelisk 1963/1967/2005
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
gift of the Barnett Newman Foundation in honour of Dr Gerard Vaughan AM 2018
© The Barnett Newman Foundation. ARS/Copyright Agency 2024