Photo credit: Effy Alexakis, Photowrite
Born in Sydney, Brad Buckley is an artist, writer, urbanist, activists, and occasional curator. During the 1970s and 1980s, Buckley travelled widely throughout North America and Europe. He was educated at St Martin’s School of Art, London (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design), and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1982 (the MFA is the terminal degree in fine arts in the US).
Buckley spent his childhood years in Sydney. His father, Jim Buckley, owned the Newcastle Hotel in Lower George Street. The Newcastle https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/the_newcastle_hotel was one of the Push pubs and Buckley senior presided over this place which was frequented by artists, poets, underworld figures and philosophers for almost twenty years. Buckley was deeply influenced by this early exposure to the possibilities of a libertine life.
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Academia
In 1989, he was appointed, Head of the Department of Image Production at the Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), prior to the College’s amalgamation with the University of Sydney. A position he held through various restructurings of the College. Later, he was the founding director of the SCA Graduate School and Associate Dean (Research). In that role and under his stewardship SCA (research code 1904) was rated 5 (well above world standard) in the 2012 Excellence in Research Australia. In 2010, he was promoted to full professor with a personal chair Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture. After the University management ‘reimagined’ SCA and reduced it from a faculty to a small department, he was appointed as a Professorial Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, and a founding Research Fellow at the Centre of Visual Art at the University of Melbourne (2017 – 2024).
Buckley is the recipient of various grants and scholarships, and in 1990 he was awarded the MoMA PS1 Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia). Buckley with Professor Su Baker AM, Pro-Vice Chancellor, the University of Melbourne, received in 2008 an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) grant to undertake research into the impact that the PhD in creative arts has had on artists in Australian universities. In 2012, with Professor Andy Dong and Associate Professor John Conomos he received a Sydney Research Network Scheme (SyReNS) grant to fund The Sydney Invention Studio.
He has been a Visiting Professor and Scholar at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (Ireland); Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (Canada); the University of Tsukuba (Japan); the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Denmark); and Parsons The New School for Design (US), among other intuitions. Buckley has also been an artist-in-residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; La Chambre Blanche, Quebec; the Norma Redpath Studio, (with Helen Hyatt-Johnston), the University of Melbourne and most recently, at the Bruny Island Foundation for the Arts Residency at the Cape Bruny Lighthouse in South Bruny National Park (with Helen Hyatt-Johnston).
Teaching
In 2016, Buckley received the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association (SUPRA) Supervisor of the Year Award 2016. And in 2004 he was awarded the first College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS) at the University of Sydney Award for Excellence in Research, Higher Degree Supervision.
Publications
Buckley has written on diverse topics from the failure of the contemporary curator, the destructions of art schools in Australia after they were amalgamated with universities and the impact of neoliberalism on society, and it’s affect on how we value contemporary art. His writings have been published in Broadsheet: Contemporary Art + Culture, Artist Profile, Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (NSW Bulletin) and The Australian. He has also contributed chapters to numerous publications including, most recently, Where Is Art?: Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies, 2022) and New Directions for University Museums(Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).
During 1999, Buckley convened with his late friend and colleague John Conomos a series of forums at Artspace Visual Art Centre in Sydney titled ‘The Republics of Ideas’. These forums explored the rhetorical, political, and cultural implications of an Australian republic. In March 2001, Pluto Press published a volume (based on the conference papers), The Republics of Ideas: Republicanism, Culture, Visual Arts, edited by Buckley and Conomos. This first publishing project led to a series of edited books with Conomos that includes Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy, NSCAD University Press, Halifax, Canada (2009); Ecologies of Invention, (with Andy Dong), Sydney University Press, Sydney, Australia (2013); Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory, Libri Publishing, Faringdon, UK (2015); Who Runs the Artworld: Money, Power and Ethics, Libri Publishing, Faringdon, UK (2017) and A Companion to Curation, Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, US (2020).
Creative Work and Research
‘HOPE: Is A four Letter Word’ in Giving Notice: Words on Walls, Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, Canada. (2010)
His creative work uses the framing device The Slaughterhouse Project, and charts social injustice and the exercise of power to exclude or marginalise those who object, in particular, to neoliberal values whether this be in institutions or more widely in society. Buckley’s work often employs theatrical strategies, such as neon lighting, ambient sound, found or authored text and large-scale wall paintings. Occasionally, a single performer is incorporated into the installation, creating a tension, altering the dynamics in the space.
The Slaughterhouse Project: Alignment and Boundaries (L’Origine du monde) and I wonder whether that’s Joanna Hiffernan with a Brazilian (revisited), Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. (2013)
His work has been exhibited widely in Australia, Europe, Japan and North America, including at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Franklin Furnace, New York; Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney; Visual Arts Gallery, at the University of Alabama, Birmingham; MoMA PS1, New York; the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland and at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax. His more recent exhibitions have been at La Chambre Blanche, Quebec; The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Plato’s Cave at EIDIA House, New York; the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Reflex Wall Painting Project, Toowoomba, and in 2023, How to teach a dingo to eat mussels in polite society (with apologies to Beuys and Broodthaers), was installed at Kandos Projects, and in the following year, The Enigma of the World, was also installed at Kandos Projects, Kandos, Australia.
The Slaughterhouse Project (War & Peace after Leo Tolstoy), Reflex Wall Painting Project, Toowoomba, Australia. (2019)
Curating
Buckley has a long-standing interest in curating and three of his significant projects are Reading and Writing Rooms (with Blair French), which was a major 30-year survey of the New Zealand-born, Canada-based artist Bruce Barber at Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney in 2008. The project was developed in conjunction with Manukau Institute of Technology and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Auckland. In 2018, the exhibition Couplings (with Helen Hyatt-Johnston) was shown at the Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney. Couplings was an exhibition that considered the cognitive and emotional lives that operates between artist couples, whether conscious or unconscious and how this dialogue influences their work. His most recent curatorial project is Ken Unsworth: Love Is the Sweetest Thing at the Macquarie University Art Gallery (2025) and consists of five installations, three of which are ‘housed’ in the purpose-built rooms. Unsworth, who is in his nineties, in this exhibition is offering us a disturbing and uncompromising view of our shared humanity in a post-truth world.
Conferences
Buckley has also developed and chaired with Conomos a number of conference sessions for the College Art Association in the US, including ‘America: the Divine Empire’ (Atlanta 2005), ‘The Contemporary Collaborator in an Interdisciplinary World’ (Dallas 2008), ‘The Erasure of Contemporary Memory, Parts One and Two’ (New York 2011) and ‘The Delinquent Curator: Has the curator failed contemporary art?’ (Chicago 2014). In 2010, he chaired and developed, with Professor Simone Douglas and senior faculty, ‘Evolution: Art and Design Research and the PhD’, at Parsons The New School (New York). While in 2019, Buckley chaired and developed ‘Gatekeeping and Ethics in a Globalised Artworld’ conference, at the Centre of Visual Art (CoVA), Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne, and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Current Projects
The curatorial rational for the exhibition Royston Harpur: A Painter’s Painter at the Mudgee Arts Precinct (MAP) is to curate a major retrospective exhibition of the late Australian abstract painter and poet Royston Harpur (1938 – 2023) in September 2025. The key objective of this project is to create an appreciation and understanding in a wider general art audience, as well as, among the professional art world (i.e., museum curators, art historians and private collectors) of the significance of Harpur’s work in the development of Australian post WW11 abstract painting. In particular, to understand that as East Asian philosophical perspectives and aesthetics gained momentum during the 1960s that these ideas impacted on the development of Australian abstraction. The curatorium for this project is Brad Buckley, Lizzy Galloway, Helen Hyatt-Johnston, Jocelyn Stenson, and Noel Thurgate.
Buckley is working on a new installation to be included in A Tale of Two Art Scenes: Taiwan and Australia Contemporary Art Exchange, Yilan Museum of Art, Yilan, Taiwan for late 2025.
Buckley is also a Council Member of the University of Sydney Association of Professors.