Andrew Sayers AM

Recent Speaker

Director - National Museum of Australia

March 16, 2011

"In the national interest: the National Museum of Australia"

 

The National Museum’s Act directs it to ‘make the most advantageous use of the national collection in the national interest’. The 10th
anniversary of the opening of the Museum’s bold and controversial building provides an opportunity to look at how the Museum has fared
against this expectation. It also provides an occasion to look at the Museum of the future. What are the big issues facing Australia? How can
the National Museum help us to define them and confront them? What is the national interest? In this address I will tackle these questions and talk about how the ideas that have shaped us as a nation (and continue to shape our thinking) can be illuminated and debated in our cultural institutions.

Mr Sayers completed a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts at Sydney University in 1979. He was appointed to the position of curatorial assistant at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1979 and became Registrar of Collections in 1980.

He left this position to become Assistant Director at the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery from 1981 to 1985. Mr Sayers moved to the National Gallery of Australia in 1985 where he remained for 13 years. In May 1996, he was appointed Assistant Director (Collections).

Andrew Sayers was appointed Director of the National Portrait Gallery in April 1998. During his tenure at the National Portrait Gallery, Mr Sayers oversaw its transformation into a significant national cultural institution. In 2008 the Portrait Gallery moved into a new lakeside building and attracted a number of international exhibitions including Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913–2008 and OBEY: Shepard Fairey Poster.

Mr Sayers' scholarly works include Drawing in Australia, 1989, Sidney Nolan: The Ned Kelly Story, 1994, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century and the Australian Art volume in the Oxford History of Art.

His principal exhibitions include New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian and American Landscapes, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, Sidney Nolan: The Ned Kelly Story and (with Dr Sarah Engledow) The World of Thea Proctor.

Andrew Sayers was born in England in 1957 and moved to Australia in 1964.