| Arts Project Australia was founded in 1974 but its roots go back to 1951 when Johanne Hilgendorf was diagnosed – in the terminology of the times – as “mentally retarded”; and Myra Hilgendorf and her family began their long engagement with the attitudes and structures of a society which denied and segregated persons with a disability in institutions, rather than acknowledge and support them within the family unit. During the next twenty years they experienced all the stigma and difficulties of caring for a person with a progressive disability at home, when there were few supports, no facilities and no respite – except those developed by parents themselves, in voluntary organisations such as the Helping Hand and STAR, which Myra joined.
By 1974, Johanna, needing full-time care, had entered an institution and Myra, a painter herself, had seen in Johanna’s drawings the lively expression of ideas and feelings which Johanna could no longer convey through speech. Requested by STAR to collect, for exhibition in Adelaide, works by the “mentally retarded”, Myra was excited by the general vitality and expressiveness of the works. The potent quality of the images was, however, in striking contrast to the poverty of materials used in their production – with the exception of the works from the Mildura centre, which has close contact with the Mildura Gallery, and access to proper art materials. These paintings, so vividly different in quality, reinforced Myra’s perception of their expressive value and her desire to have them exhibited in regular galleries with the dignity accorded the work of practising artists. In such a setting, she felt, the work could be seen, detached from the negative context of disability, and its aesthetic properties recognised.
In pursuit of this vision, Myra, with a group of like-minded professional friends, all involved with intellectual disability, founded the Art Project for the Mentally Retarded in 1974. Encouragement from the Director of the National Gallery and the Professor of Fine Arts at Monash University, Patrick McCaughey, finally led to the Ministry for the Arts granting Arts Project $4000 to mount an exhibition. The use of Georges’ Gallery and the framing were donated and the catalogue was provided by the Swinburne Department of Design. Mrs Hamer, wife of the then Premier, became patron of the fledgling organisation. In 1975 The Age produced a series of articles on the residents of Kew Cottages entitled “The Minus Children”. The Arts Project named this first exhibition Minus/Plus, wishing to counter the negative implications of “The Minus Children”. The reviews were laudatory and Georges’ – then a leading gallery – was flooded with interested viewers, from college students and their lecturers, to groups from the newly established centres for people with an intellectual disability. Art critics reviewed the show enthusiastically and the Minus/Plus show went on to tour the regional galleries of Victoria.
During the next few years many exhibitions were organised, mounted and framed by the Committee volunteers. In 1981 the Commonwealth Department of Social Services asked Arts Project to provide a show in Canberra to launch the International Year of the Child. A grant was provided to frame the work and James Mollison of the Australian National Gallery opened the exhibition.
In 1982 Cheryl Daye, a fine arts graduate from Philip Institute of Technology (later to become RMIT) was teaching art at Janefield Special School in Melbourne when she was invited to join the Committee. Her experience led her to envisage the scope of Arts Project beyond the collection and exhibition of paintings to the establishment of a studio workshop staffed by practising artists and supplied with artists' quality materials where people with an intellectual disability could develop their particular talents. She felt it essential that such a studio should not be based within existing institutional settings or dependent upon space being made available by other organisations, but should develop as an independent community-based entity.
Renamed Arts Project Australia, the change in community, political and institutional attitudes gradually enabled the organisation to acquire funding, first from the Commonwealth Schools Commission, and later from the state Department of Human Services. Over the next fifteen years it developed into its present notable form as an art environment for people with an intellectual disability previously deprived of an opportunity for expression and recognition. |
 
|
