Members Hour: Museum of Sydney

Tess Allas holds a master’s of curation from The University of Sydney and a Bachelor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong. She is an award-winning visual arts curator, researcher, writer and artist specialising in contemporary Indigenous art. She has worked in Indigenous cultural development since the early 1990s and has been engaged as a curator for Museums of History NSW, the Art Gallery of NSW, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection (USA), the Art Gallery of South Australia, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Wollongong Art Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury and Carriageworks. Her independently curated exhibitions as well as her own works as an artist have been shown in Australia, Finland, France, Canada and the United States. Her visual arts practice has included print-making, ceramics, installation and the film Andy Warhol on Aboriginal art, a collaboration with American artist Charlie Schneider and Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr artist Vernon Ah Kee. She has published for institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Artspace, the Remai Modern (Canada) and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection (USA). She has written articles for many contemporary art journals and authored over 400 biographies of Australian Indigenous artists for the Design and Art Australia Online website (daao.org.au). In 2021 Tess co-authored two chapters on Indigenous contemporary art in two separate academic books both published by Routledge (USA). Tess says: ‘I am inspired by a sense of justice and human rights for the betterment of a strong cultural and community life. The very qualities I inherited from my activist grandfather, Jack Tattersall.’