The Art Gallery of New South Wales

Two buildings, named sixteen months late

The Sydney Modern Project opened on Saturday 3 December 2022. The new building is by SANAA — Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa — with Architectus as executive architect, while Tonkin Zulaikha Greer handled the revitalisation of the old building and McGregor Coxall the landscape. It cost 344 million dollars: 244 million from the state and more than 100 million raised philanthropically. It brought a public art garden, three accessible roof terraces, green roofs, learning spaces and two new lifts linking Woolloomooloo with the city, and it was the first public art museum in Australia to earn a six-star environmental design rating.

The gallery describes the new building as close to doubling the old one's exhibition space, and sets itself a target of at least two million visitors a year. It publishes no total floor area for the two buildings together, only figures room by room, so any single square-metre total for the campus comes from journalism rather than from the gallery.

The names came later, and the gap is the interesting part. On 16 April 2024 — sixteen months after the new building opened — the two were given names in the Sydney language, after consultation with Aboriginal stakeholders including the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council. Naala Badu, "seeing waters", is the new north building. Naala Nura, "seeing Country", is the original nineteenth-century sandstone building to the south. The institution itself was not renamed: it remains the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The campus stands on Gadigal Country.

The Tank

Under the new building are two decommissioned Second World War naval oil tanks, and one of them is now a gallery. Formally the Nelson Packer Tank, on the lowest level of Naala Badu, it runs to about 2,200 square metres with seven-metre ceilings, reached by a spiral staircase designed by the architects or by lift. The gallery presents it as a piece of the state's mid-twentieth-century industrial heritage opened to the public for the first time. Accounts of when it was drained, and of the forest of concrete columns inside it, come from the press rather than the gallery. Who the Nelson Packer name honours is not published.

Yiribana, which moved

The Yiribana Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art is the clearest case of an old description being wrong twice over. It did not sit on the third level: it was on the lowest level of the original building. And it is no longer in that building at all — it moved on 3 December 2022 into a space on the ground level of the new building, more than forty per cent larger, and is now the first gallery a visitor reaches on entering.

Yiribana means "this way" in the Sydney language, and the named, dedicated gallery dates from November 1994.

What it is, and under what Act

It is a statutory body under the Art Gallery of New South Wales Act 1980, which constitutes the Art Gallery of New South Wales Trust, and it is an executive agency of the state's creative industries department. Its own description of itself is one of Australia's flagship art museums and the state's leading visual arts institution.

The claim that it is "one of three major public galleries but the only one in Sydney" has no basis in anything official, and the second half is plainly untrue, since Sydney has other public art museums.

1871, and the building that took thirteen years

The founding date is 1871, when an Academy of Art was established in Sydney; it used government money to acquire the first works for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1874. The first permanent home was Clark's New Assembly Hall on Elizabeth Street from 1875 to 1880, and the collection moved to the present Domain site in December 1885, into a six-room building — a rejected competition scheme having produced the structure that contemporaries mocked as the "art barn".

The sandstone building is Walter Liberty Vernon's, as Government Architect, and it went up in stages across thirteen years: the first courts opened in 1897, the southern half was complete by 1901, the oval lobby followed in 1902 and the front was finished in 1909.

So "opened in 1884" is wrong on every available reading — it is not the founding, not the first acquisitions, not the move to the Domain and not the Vernon building.

The Captain Cook Wing, and which extension doubled it

Two additions are routinely welded together, and getting them apart matters because the names mislead in both directions.

The Captain Cook wing is the 1972 one, by Andrew Andersons, opened on 5 May 1972 for the bicentenary of Cook's voyage — 1770 and two hundred years, not 1788. It is not the 1988 work and it is not what doubled the gallery.

What doubled the gallery was the eastern extension of 1988, also by Andersons, which added display space, an Asian art gallery and an outdoor sculpture garden. So an account crediting a "Captain Cook Bicentenary Wing" of 1988 with a doubling in 1971 has managed to get the name, the year and the event all attached to the wrong things.

Two later additions tend to be omitted entirely: an Asian gallery of 2003 by Richard Johnson of Johnson Pilton Walker, with a café, restaurant and function area; and the John Kaldor Family Gallery of 2010, converted from the former collection store, which added some 3,300 square metres and brought display space to around nine thousand.

The collections

The gallery holds 37,553 works in total — 22,631 Australian and 13,374 international.

Its own framing of the Australian collection leads with First Nations art, connecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander work with the rest, and calls the collection among the finest and most representative in the country, running from the early nineteenth century to the present. That is close to the opposite of older descriptions of a collection of works by settlers.

Two paintings worth naming, because both are verifiable and both hang in the Grand Courts on the ground level of Naala Nura: Tom Roberts's The Golden Fleece of 1894, originally titled Shearing at Newstead, and Frederick McCubbin's On the wallaby track of 1896 — the gallery's own capitalisation, and it records an alternative title, In the bush. The gallery does use the term Heidelberg school, describing Arthur Streeton, of whom it holds fifty-two works, as a key member of that school of Australian impressionism.

The Asian collection is one the gallery rates highly — one of the most distinguished in Australia, strongest in Chinese and Japanese art, with growing Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Indonesian holdings, and spanning, in its own phrase, Indonesia to Mongolia and Japan to Iran. It began with a gift of ceramics and bronzes from the Government of Japan in 1879. It is shown in the Asian Lantern on the lower level of Naala Nura, in an ongoing display that includes a working Japanese tearoom — so it stayed in the old building and sits below ground level rather than on it.

The international collection began with British Victorian art, not with Italian or Dutch painting, and runs from fifteenth-century Renaissance works through modernism to the contemporary, with particular strengths in ceramics and photography.

The Archibald, the Wynne and the Sulman

The gallery runs all three, and older accounts of it manage not to mention them.

The Archibald Prize, for portraiture, comes from the will of J. F. Archibald, dated 15 March 1916; he died in 1919, the first competition was held in 1921 and the first exhibition opened in January 1922. The trustees select both the finalists and the winner. Entrants must have lived in Australia or New Zealand during the eligibility period; the subject should be distinguished in art, letters, science or politics; the work must be painted from life with at least one sitting; and since 2003 each artist may enter only one work a year. Alongside it run the Packing Room Prize, chosen by the staff who receive the entries, and a people's choice decided by public vote. It has not always been awarded — the trustees found no worthy entry in 1964 and 1980 — and there was no exhibition in 1968 because of building works.

The Wynne Prize, from the bequest of Richard Wynne, who died in 1895, has been awarded since 1897 for the best landscape of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours, or the best figure sculpture by an Australian artist — the alternative is often forgotten. It too is judged by the trustees. The Sulman Prize, from Sir John Sulman's bequest, has run since 1936 for the best subject painting, genre painting or mural project, and is judged by a guest artist invited each year rather than by the trustees.

The three are shown together. In 2025 the exhibition ran from 10 May to 17 August, with 903 Archibald entries and fifty-seven finalists, and was won by Julie Fragar. In 2026 the winners were announced on 8 May and the exhibition ran 9 May to 16 August, the Wynne drawing 773 entries and fifty-two finalists; the Archibald finalists then tour regional galleries in New South Wales and Victoria. Dates for 2027 have not been announced, and the pattern of entries closing in early May with the exhibition running to mid-August should not be stated as though it were fixed.

Heritage listing, which arrived in 2024

This is the fact most likely to surprise. The gallery was added to the State Heritage Register on 1 November 2024, as item 02096, the minister having directed the listing on 25 October. Before that it was not on the register at all — it had been on the National Trust's own register since April 1979, which is a different thing entirely, and a submission on the Sydney Modern proposal had noted the absence and the intention to nominate it.

The surrounding Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain has been register item 01070 since April 1999, and the two curtilages overlap across part of the Domain.

Who runs it, and how many come

The director is Maud Page, from March 2025 — the gallery's tenth director and its first woman in the role, having joined in 2017 as deputy director. The president of the board of trustees is Michael Rose AM, appointed from 1 January 2025 with a term to the end of 2027, succeeding David Gonski AC. The gallery's own figures for the size of the board do not agree with each other, so the size of the board is better left unstated.

For 2024–25 the annual report gives 2,582,657 visits in total, up seventeen per cent, of which 2,369,750 were to the two buildings and the rest to touring and partnership programmes. The prize exhibition drew 100,272 in 2024 and 83,674 in 2025. The report's digital figures contradict one another in three places and are not worth repeating.

Visiting, eating and the picnic question

General entry is free and needs no ticket; some special exhibitions are charged, sometimes with timed entry. Open daily from ten to five, and until ten on Wednesdays, closed on Christmas Day and Good Friday. The address is Art Gallery Road, The Domain, about fifteen minutes' walk from the city centre.

The eating places are not where older accounts put them. There is no top-floor restaurant and no second-floor café. In Naala Nura the restaurant is on the ground level and the café on the lower level; in Naala Badu there is a casual all-day restaurant on the lower level and a kiosk outdoors on the Welcome Plaza built around native Australian ingredients. A pop-up bar runs on Wednesday evenings.

On picnics the gallery is precise, and the old advice about the grounds is too loose. Food and drink are not allowed inside. Visitors may eat their own food outdoors in the Art Garden between the two buildings or on the Welcome Plaza, with bins provided, and no alcohol anywhere on the site. For an actual picnic the gallery points across the road, to The Domain or the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney.

Access

Naala Badu is the easier way in: from the Welcome Plaza on a gentle gradient, with no stairs and automatic doors. Accessible toilets are on three of its lower levels, with a Changing Places facility on one of them.

Naala Nura is harder. Its Art Gallery Road entrance has nine stairs, with a ramp to the left, and the vestibule beyond has two more stairs or a ramp; there is also a rear entrance off the service road. Accessible toilets are on three lower levels, with an all-gender toilet and a Changing Places facility on another.

Between the buildings, the Art Garden carries an accessible path linking Lincoln Crescent to the city by two lifts, running from six in the morning to eleven at night, with public stairs available at any hour. Wheelchairs and mobility scooters can be borrowed free against identification, the scooters bookable ahead. Guide, hearing and assistance dogs are welcome throughout, and there are hearing loops in the theatre, the auditorium and several rooms in both buildings. Accessible parking is on the street beside both buildings, near the Woolloomooloo gate of the botanic garden, and on site behind Naala Nura by intercom — but in the Domain car park the nearest lift is out of service and there is no sealed path across the park.

What is on, into 2027

A long run of exhibitions carries into the new year: And Still I Rise and Proximate Cosmologies to 10 January 2027; Nolan: Origins to 7 February, charged; Super Nature to 14 February; the Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial to 7 March; works by Freddie Timms and Timmy Timms Major to 18 April; The Edge of Things to 9 May; and a Spanish Baroque show of Pedro de Mena's sculpture also running into 2027. Takashi Murakami opens on 5 December 2026, charged.

The Brett Whiteley Studio at Surry Hills, a separate site of the gallery, reopened in mid-2026 after extensive upgrades. Nothing is announced for 2028, and no building closures are announced.

One correction to a common assumption: the gallery's 150th anniversary has already passed. It counts from the Academy of Art of 1871 and marked a hundred and fifty years in 2021, before the new building opened. There is no approaching anniversary to plan around.