On Friday night, the Newcastle Art Gallery (NAG) is throwing open its doors and filling the road and park with giant fluffy doughnuts, live music, dancing and art in a free-for-all street party – themed “industrial disco” – that has been 16 years in the making.
For the NAG team, and Novocastrians more broadly, this is a significant moment, marking the long-awaited completion of the $48m gallery expansion project, which went from being “very divisive” in the community to something that’s generating “a remarkable buzz and excitement,” according to Jeremy Bath, the CEO of Newcastle city council.
Now the largest public gallery in NSW outside of Sydney, it opens with the major exhibition Iconic Loved Unexpected, displaying 500 artworks from its 7,000-strong collection. Displayed over the 13 gallery spaces (eight of which are new, in a floor space that’s more than double that of the 1997 building), it’s a star-studded showcase of the gallery’s $145m collection, including Australian greats Emily Kam Kngwarray, John Olsen, Margaret Preston, Brett Whiteley, Daniel Boyd and Margaret Olley.
It’s the headliners who will draw the crowds, but the gallery – led by the NAG director, Lauretta Morton – has been intentional in championing lesser-known local artists, too.
The intention is set by the first artwork that greets visitors: an ambitious new commission made by Awabakal artist and seventh-generation Novocastrian Shellie Smith in collaboration with sculptor Julie Squires, who co-founded Newcastle makerspace The Soap Factory.
Titled Watawan (Mullet), it is a 3.5-metre aluminium spiral of 29 mullet fish that swirls down from the ceiling: a large undertaking that Smith was initially nervous about, she says, but “being part of such a significant collection is so exciting”. While viewing the work, visitors will experience another new commission: Sonic Acknowledgment of Country, a soundscape by local musician, composer, researcher and Kamilaroi man Adam Manning.
The local emphasis continues into the expansion’s construction, which seamlessly integrates the old and new buildings. The timber benches throughout the galleries were made by local woodworker Jonathan Everett; the street-fronting cafe was designed by local firm EJE Architecture; and the shop by the entrance is stocked with goods from more than 30 local makers selected through an open call. “It’s really important that we are helping our local arts ecology to thrive,” says Morton.
As visitors pass the front desk, they will encounter the small Margaret Olley gallery which will rotate her colourful still lifes and Newcastle watercolours: a nod to Olley’s tradition of giving the gallery an artwork every year on her birthday; and the $500,000 the Margaret Olley Trust bequeathed to the gallery in 2025.
Walking through the new double-heighted First Nations gallery, which features a photographic collage by Dr Christian Thompson and two new commissions from Renae Lamb and Megan Cope, visitors can take a detour into a smaller, older room packed with historical masterpieces from the likes of William Dobell and Grace Cossington Smith.
A set of floating cast-concrete staircases retained from the original building, brings visitors upwards, for an opportunity to lie beneath John Olsen’s The sea sun of 5 bells (1964) installed – as the artist intended – on the ceiling.
Around a corner, the dense red sculpture of Dani Marti offers a more tactile experience. Constructed from many tightly hung plastic-curtains that visitors are invited to move through, the roughly 4 by 4 metre Looking for Felix (2000) engulfs you in an intensity of colour and gentle swishing sounds: an ode to the Cuban artist Félix González-Torres.
A temporary wall has been installed in the centre of one of the larger new spaces. On it is If not now, when? by local artist Fiona Lee who lost her home, studio and possessions in the bushfires of 2019-20. She has used the puddly pieces of metal from her melted Toyota to write the word “NOW” in large letters across a wall, urging the government to take action on the climate crisis. Nearby is Patricia Piccinini’s charming yet unsettling Nature’s little helpers – Surrogate (for the northern hairy nosed wombat). The life-like creature seems calm and content, but from behind it reveals six pouches on either side of its armour-like spine, which contain the protruding feet and hands of growing wombats at various stages of gestation.
Morton says “the sky’s the limit now, because we’re a grown up gallery. We’re what we should have for a city of our size.”
The 2026-27 program will see solo shows from emerging and mid-career local artists including Tiyan Baker and Angela Tiatia, alongside those from farther afield, such as Torres Strait Islander-born and Cairns-based printmaker Brian Robinson, Japanese kinetic sculpture duo A.A. Murakami and beloved comedian, children’s book author and painter Anh Do. Meanwhile, new Open Space residencies will provide Hunter region artists with seed funding, mentorship and a space to produce new work: particularly important offerings at a time of funding cuts across regional arts and the Australian creative industries more broadly, as art education opportunities, such as the University of Newcastle’s fine art degree, are being shut down.
The gallery has already demonstrated that there is an appetite for art. Since September 2025, small sections of the expansion have been open for previews in limited hours – and more than 20,000 visitors from 35 countries, and every Australian state and territory, have passed through the doors, according to the gallery. Sometimes, lines form down the street for access – and the shop has already exceeded its annual targets. “We’ve been inundated,” Morton beams.
The success is particularly vindicating given the battle that was fought to make it happen. The expansion project was voted down by Newcastle city council when first tabled in 2008, due to questions of funding, and criticism of the initial plan which sought to demolish, rather than integrate, the original 1977 brutalist building. It was only after years of political back and forth – and a relentless fundraising campaign led by Morton, who came on board in 2018 – that the council finally voted unanimously for the expansion in 2021, committing to the biggest investment in infrastructure that the city has undertaken.
“The art gallery was for too long, a very divisive asset,” says Bath. “There were people who had never been here but felt very strongly that the art gallery was everything that was wrong with the city, that it wasn’t for the working class.”
“Over the last five years, people have recognised that art, and celebrating art and creating infrastructure that enables the appreciation of art is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the mind; it’s a good thing for the community; but most importantly, it’s a good thing economically.” He points to a recent council report, which shows that Newcastle’s creative industries contribute more than half a billion dollars annually to the local economy. They encourage cultural tourism, provide employment, and are helping diversify the city from its industrial coal and steel past, after BHP Steelworks, Newcastle’s main employer, was shut down in 1999.
The New Annual festival, which has been running since 2021, has also played a major role in this shift, alongside the 2025 completion of upgrades to the iconic art-deco Newcastle Ocean Baths and Newcastle airport, which now includes an international terminal. There is a sense of momentum in the air. “All of a sudden, Sydney is interested in Newcastle,” Bath says, “and that’s one of the reasons why I think that the art gallery is proving so beloved [by] locals … this is the magnet to get Sydneysiders to come here and spend their money and fall in love with our city.”
Newcastle Art Gallery is holding its opening celebration on Friday 27 February 5-9pm and opens to the public on Saturday 28 February
