2026 Betty Churcher AO Memorial Oration

Tracy Cooper-Lavery: The National Gallery respectfully acknowledges Traditional Custodians throughout Australia whose art we care for and to whose lands National Gallery exhibitions and staff travel. We recognise their continuing connections to Country and culture, and pay our respects to their Elders, leaders and artists, past and present.

NGA Art Talks is a podcast brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. I’m Tracy Cooper-Lavery, Chair of the National Gallery’s Gender Equity Action Group, and in this episode, we’ll hear the 2026 Betty Churcher Memorial Oration, honouring the legacy of the first and only woman to lead the National Gallery.

Serving as its Director from 1990 to 1997, Churcher was a trailblazing Australian arts administrator. Known for her passion for making art accessible, she was affectionately dubbed 'Betty Blockbuster' for her love of bringing major international exhibitions to Australia.

For this year’s Oration, we were joined by Quincy Houghton, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and International Initiatives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drawing on her three decades of experience shaping exhibitions at two of the world’s greatest museums, in this talk Houghton reflects on her own personal journey, and the evolving role of art galleries around the world at large.

Quincy Houghton: Good evening. How's that? Good day. Yeah, I know, I need some work. I'm so delighted to be here. I would also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri peoples and pay my warmest respects to their Elders, leaders, and artists, past and present who host us here today.

I would also like to acknowledge the family of Betty Churcher. Hello. What an amazing legacy she gave this institution and this passionate arts community. Your continuing commitment to that legacy and to the voice of women in the arts is really so meaningful. Thank you for letting me add my voice to these voices tonight, it’s such a privilege. I have been asked to share some thoughts about my work. But first, I wanted to begin with a brief origin story.

This is Corning, my hometown. I grew up in a small company town in upstate New York with a then population of some 17,000 people. It's now closer actually to around 10. The company was Corning Glass Works, now Corning Inc, known for many major scientific discoveries over the years from Pyrex, both the beakers and the measuring cups that many of you probably still have in your kitchen. And Corelle, I don't know if you had that here, but because of the technology, you were supposed to be able to drop the dishes on the floor and not have them break. We tried really hard to make them break in my house because my father worked for Corning. And also catalytic converters for automobiles and fibre optic technology, of course, so important in the world today. And Gorilla Glass, which anyone with an iPhone knows very well. It's a remarkable company, with its headquarters still nestled into upstate New York.

The only museum I knew about growing up was the Corning Museum of Glass, where at that point in its history, fairly staid, I'm sorry to say, collection displays showing the very best of examples of the history of glass were mixed with didactic presentations about how glass was made.

Just think, lots and lots of sand. I know it's silica, but it's sand. I am now lucky enough to serve as a trustee of CMOG, as it is called, which is an award-winning cultural landmark with a stellar collection, beautifully designed galleries, engaging exhibitions and incredible glass making facilities. But I was far from turning into a museum professional in those early days.

Perhaps a better clue was my utter fascination with what I can remember were the only two art books in my parents’ house. One was a book called The Family of Man, which I hope some of you know.

A mind blowing selection of photographs from around the world assembled by the photographer and curator Edward Steichen in 1955, who wrote in the introduction and I quote, ‘It was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life, as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world’. End quote.

The other, much more unusual for a fairly conservative family in a small town, was the exhibition catalogue from the groundbreaking 1972 Diane Arbus retrospective at MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The pictures such as here, the Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx in 1970 or the Teenage couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C. in 1963 were mesmerising. I was the youngest in my family by quite some time and with a fair amount of alone time, and I cannot tell you how many hours I spent looking at the photographs in both of these books, alone in my observations and just entranced by the pictures and the stories that they told. After studying art history at university and a pretty serious stint as an investment banker in London. I know, I know, but it was the 1980s so I can be excused. I found myself in Los Angeles where I established my career as a museum professional for real, first and briefly only for a few years at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and then much more meaningfully, at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

My very first job at the Getty, I had the euphemistic title of – ready for this? – 'Transition Manager'. I don't know what that means, and I was responsible, amongst other things, for overseeing the move of the museum staff and the collections into the new museum building on the Getty Centre campus which was in the process of being built.

I was originally based out of the Getty Villa, which you see here, an extraordinary recreation of a 1st century AD Roman villa that opened in the hills between Pacific Palisades and Malibu in 1974.

When I got there, the Getty Centre, including the museum buildings, was well on its way up. After years of planning the galleries they were finally coming to fruition. When we finally opened the Getty Centre in December 1997 and the work of so many was over, the hard and exciting work of so many others was just beginning. This new space finally had proper galleries for temporary exhibitions, unlike at the Getty Villa, including a large exhibitions pavilion. But we first had to figure out how to manage a programme of this size, both operationally and content wise.

For example, what would be the process for conceiving, developing and realising exhibitions? And even more importantly, what would define a Getty exhibition and the Getty exhibitions programme overall? I had by that time been lucky enough to have been asked to run this new exhibitions programme – a sort of perfect left brain, right brain combo of my work in museums and in the financial world. It was just my dream job and my job involved many practical responsibilities which I loved working through. But it was this conceptual part, this programme shaping part that was the most interesting.

One priority which we established early on, was that the exhibitions programme would be anchored in the permanent collection. This included the art of Ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan worlds, European painting, sculpture, drawings and illuminated manuscripts created before 1900 and photography, the last with no confines as to time or place.

We were also very aware that we were new at this and we needed to learn from the pros. And you know who the pro was? The Met. The first exhibition celebrating the Renaissance painter Dosso Dossi, presented in early 1999, was curated by my wonderful, now fellow Deputy Director at The Met, Andrea Bayer with colleagues in Ferrara, and at the Getty. The Getty had acquired a Dosso in 1989 and the project allowed us to gain further insight into the artist's practice by mounting an ambitious monographic exhibition.

Another seminal project, Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils, was a tour de force of connoisseurship, encouraging all visitors, both experienced museum goers and first-time visitors alike, to slow down and look closely. Notice the details.

We also did really beautiful smaller shows such as this one, just looking at Cézanne watercolour still lifes. In my opinion less really can be more with tightly focused exhibitions. I think they are absolute gems and are often overlooked. They're also great training opportunities for younger curators to learn the ropes.

As the programme at the Getty developed, so did our appetite for pushing the envelope. This included negotiating ambitious international loans, including precious icons from the Monastery of Saint Catherine on the Sinai Peninsula in 2006, working directly with the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, as well as the Archbishop and the other fathers safeguarding the monastery and its collections.

The project included having to figure out how to build crates and exhibition casework that would maintain the desert-like conditions in the monastery, about 30% relative humidity, which is very dry throughout the transport to Los Angeles, the entire duration of the exhibition, and the return of the objects to Egypt. Needless to say, my experience of sand at the Corning Museum of Glass came in handy.

The Getty also began working more with contemporary artists, particularly those whose practise was strongly tied to our permanent collection, such as Bill Viola, whose direct sources of reference for his body of work called The Passions, were the late Medieval and early Renaissance paintings at the Getty.

I hope some of you, perhaps some a little bit longer in the tooth like me, had a chance to see this exhibition when it came to Canberra. We were really thrilled to have the exhibition come to Canberra following its presentation at another National Gallery in London. It was a fantastic show.

In 2015, going on 21 years at the Getty, I was approached about the search for the Associate Director for Exhibitions job at The Met. I loved LA and it's everything you would think of. Cue Baywatch and Clueless and La La Land and everything more, with an extremely vibrant and intellectually stimulating arts community. I also loved my job and I loved my colleagues and not unimportantly, it would be a huge move for my family.

But it was, as I saw it then and I still see it now, an opportunity of a lifetime. In my little world of people that organise exhibitions at big museums, this is the gig. The breadth of the collections, the ambition of the programme, the brilliance of the curators and the teams that realise their visions, and last but not least, the resources that support it, all of which are raised by our incredible development colleagues, are unparalleled.

So I packed up my life and I headed to New York in the summer of 2016. At my leaving party, my Getty colleagues produced an amazing video set to Randy Newman's I Love LA, and they thought long and hard about what image best symbolised New York in the film. You'll be glad to know it was an appearance by the pizza rat captured dragging a slice of pizza down the steps of a New York City subway.

Please note that I did everyone a favour by only doing a screen grab, although it's a fuzzy one, instead of the full video because this rat, he drags this slice of pizza down every single step going down to the subway. I'm not sure why I say he's a ‘he’, but as and you all know, we are celebrating International Women's Day. And so I think it would be unfair of me to call it a ‘she’.

And then here I was. The first thing I have to tell you is that it never gets old walking up these steps, ever. I'm almost 10 years in and it's magic every day, rain or shine. A few facts. The Met today consists of 21 different wings built between 1880 and 1991, which have a footprint of roughly four city blocks and comprise roughly 2,000,000 square feet. It's big. We are situated within Central Park.

We are a staff of almost 2,000, last year welcoming some 6.3 million visitors with an average age – and this is really fantastic, I think – of 35 years old. Our audience has recovered to pre-Covid levels which we are very happy about, particularly that we are now open six versus seven days a week and that happened as we were coming out of Covid. We have seen a significant increase in local visitation which compensates for a reduction in international, and it makes that the necessity of a strong program of changing exhibitions even more important.

We have 19 different curatorial areas overseeing a collection of more than 1.5 million objects spanning the full 5,000 years of human creativity. Sorry, that's a lot of math, but it just gives you a sense of the scale. Within the walls of The Met are incredibly beautiful spaces, like here the Engelhard Court in the American Wing featuring the 1824 bank building façade that was brought to The Met and reassembled 100 years later in 1924, and the Temple of Dendur, a gift from the Egyptian government to United States in 1965. The wing was literally built around it and opened to the public in 1978.

There is also the Met Cloisters which opened in 1938 and is dedicated to the art and architecture of Mediaeval France and it's famous not only for its collection, including the Unicorn Tapestries, but also it's beautiful Medieval style gardens.I believe I am right by saying that we are the only encyclopaedic museum of our scale that collects all the way up to the present day with an active programme of artists commissions.

One of the first initiatives of our director, Max Hollein, was the establishment of an annual artist commission for the niches on the facade of The Met along 5th Ave that have never been finished. The first commission was the work of Wangechi Mutu, the Kenyan American artist in 2019. You have actually one of the series in your galleries right there – I was so happy to see it when I arrived yesterday.

This year's Genesis Facade Commission artist is Jeffrey Gibson, an interdisciplinary artist of Cherokee descent and a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who is also in your collection. And the work very cleverly installed on the same platform as the Wangechi Mutu.

As some of you may know, Jeffrey Gibson is interested in rethinking our understanding of the non-human world, hoping to encourage newfound empathy towards animal life. Our location in Central Park was of particular interest and all of the four animals he represented were once denizens of the park.

We have also commissioned works for the roof of the Modern Wing since 2013. Here are two of my favourite recent examples of the Roof Commission. This is Alex De Corte's blue, big bird, entitled As Long as the Sun Lasts, presented in the summer of 2021. And here is Los Angeles based Lauren Halsey's full scale architectural structure, presented two years later in the summer of 2023, with sources as varied as ancient Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions like tagging.

One of the many reasons I love my job at The Met is that I get to work with an incredible team of curators who are constantly developing a widely diverse range of exhibition projects. It is a real luxury to have such a wealth of great exhibition ideas coming in all the time. Many of our peer institution generate fewer projects in-house and I feel so lucky to be in this position at The Met.

After the ideas are pitched and considered, first by Max and me and then by an exhibition advisory committee, I work closely with Max in shaping the programme – we do about 35 to 40 exhibitions a year – in a holistic way. We look across multiple years to consider what shows are opposite each other, what spaces are up while others are down, what shows are in anchor spaces and seasons, what shows we can take more risks on and kind of counter-program, versus the ones we need to count on more for audience generation.

What is the right mix of thematic and monographic exhibitions? Where should we maximise loans versus focusing on our permanent collection? And how can we provide opportunities for this incredibly wide range of collecting areas? All of these sorts of considerations, although a huge amount of time and effort and resources are spent developing each individual project, it is the range and rhythm of exhibitions, the balance of the program that is really the most, I think important thing that we focus on and I think it really defines the program.

We know from surveys that 40% of visitors to The Met name specific temporary exhibitions as their top motivation to come. And it's not like we don't have competition in New York. Our collection is the anchor of our programme, which is rooted in rigorous scholarship and critical analysis.

Take the recent Manet/Degas exhibition for example, a major international loan show we presented in the fall of 2023, which looked at the relationship, sometimes supportive, sometimes contentious, between these two seminal artists. Over half, over half of the 160 works in the exhibition came from the collections of the two organising partners, The Met and the Musée d’Orsay. It's an amazing statistic, the strength of our collection and the generous loan reciprocity we manage with museums around the world. The flow of loans back and forth hugely facilitates the success of our programme.

Another exhibition supported by groundbreaking international research by a team of scholars was Surrealism Beyond Borders co-organised with the Tate Modern and presented in New York and London in 21 and 22. This exhibition was full of new discoveries and its ambitious checklist and strong exhibition narrative – another really key priority for us – refocused attention on this revolutionary and globe spanning movement.

Complex thematic narratives are also actively championed with many curatorial teams working across collection areas in these team efforts.Such as Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now), a show we did at The Met Breuer. Some of you will know this amazing building by Marcel Breuer on Madison Avenue that used to be the Whitney Museum before it moved downtown. The Met rented it, or leased it, for five years a few years ago. When I arrived here yesterday, I immediately felt comfortable in this brutalist building. I really loved programming shows at the Breuer and I and I miss it Like Life looked at verisimilitude in sculpture and how artists have sought to replicate the literal living presence of the human body from the 14th to the 21st centuries. It was incredibly smart, a little bit creepy, but really great.

We have also made an effort to forefront exhibitions of historic content when the topic resonates with contemporary audiences. A good example of this is The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I. Who was ready for this? Duke Consort of Burgundy, Archduke of Austria, King of the Romans and Holy Roman Emperor Elect. The exhibition focused on image shaping and the construction and in some cases fabrication of a ruler's legacy – still a very relevant and messy topic. Other recent exhibitions have highlighted additional programmatic priorities, including engaging with our local and national cultural history.

This exhibition called Play It Loud, celebrated the instruments of rock n roll, and we presented it in 2019. We have a musical instruments department at The Met and it is full of brilliant exhibition ideas. You'll be very glad to know that Play It Loud included a piece of Australian history: Angus Young’s Gibson SG, the cornerstone of the AC/DC sound. Here is the guitar in action, and there are the ‘Only at the Met’ exhibitions which allow us to capitalise on our global reach, long standing curatorial and institutional relationships, tenacity, resources and ambition to bring the most extraordinary works of art together under our roof.

Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India explored the pre-Buddhist origins of figurative sculpture in India and the narrative traditions that were central to this formative moment in early Indian art. The loans included massive stone sculptures from 12 museums and archaeological sites across India. And as you can imagine, getting them to The Met and installing them in our galleries was a truly Herculean feat.

And we are just about to open Raphael: Sublime Poetry, which will bring together over 230 masterpieces including drawings, paintings and tapestries, many of which have never been lent, from over 70 lenders across Europe and the United States. I think ‘Betty Blockbuster’ would have loved both of these exhibitions.

And we have this little party every May. But what many on social media don't realise is that The Met Gala is not just a party in and of itself, because it celebrates the opening of our annual Spring Costume Institute exhibition. These exhibitions excel not only for their forward-thinking curatorial vision, but in their incredible design and installation. Shown here is Camp: Notes on Fashion from 2019, which examined how the elements of irony, pastiche, theatricality and exaggeration are expressed in fashion and Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion which reactivated the sensory capacities of masterworks in the museum collection through diverse technologies, all visually connected through the themes of nature.

Last year's groundbreaking exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. One of the rare Costume Institute exhibitions to focus exclusively on menswear, interpreted the concept of dandyism as both an aesthetic and a strategy.

The Met works actively with international museums on co-organised exhibitions. All of these shows were true partnerships and conceptual collaborations and not just logistical ones, and those are really the best kind of projects to do together. We are also like the National Gallery presenting an active touring exhibition programme. One of our touring exhibitions anchored in our Old Master paintings collection and allowed because we were doing this major skylights renovation project at the museum over those galleries was presented in Brisbane at QAGOMA in 2021

Before two Japanese venues, and here we very successfully sent highlights of our Oceanic collection to two venues during the Rockefeller Wing renovation. One was the Pudong Museum of Art in Shanghai, where those of us participating in the press conference turned these little wheels – see the little wheels? – and a little boat moved along the podium from New York to Shanghai. It was a frigate. It was not the right boat, but it was pretty fun.

The other venue was the National Museum in Doha. We recently sent an exhibition of Impressionist and early modern paintings from the Lehman Collection, another Met curatorial department, to Taiwan. Here you have another press conference. This time we were asked to pour sand – I know, it's a theme – over sticky letters that would then emerge like magic, right? Except for the fact that the adhesive had dried out by the time we poured the sand and so there was no magic.

The exhibition also went to the National Museum of Korea. We will soon be opening an exhibition featuring jewellery from across the museum collections at the Hong Kong Palace Museum and at the Shanghai Museum of Art. The new Shanghai East. These touring projects are important to us for a variety of reasons, including revenue generation, but most importantly it's about further developing our global presence.

I understand that you have seven exhibitions generated by the National Gallery that are touring at the moment, which is really impressive. But, and I may talk myself out of a job by saying this, I actually think the most impressive statistic about The Met is not about exhibitions. It's about our commitment to enhancing our permanent collection galleries. In the decade between 2021 and 2031, one quarter of The Met's Galleries will be renewed and refreshed with updated narratives, improving the way we present our collections and dialogue with the current time.

I know you have been embarking on a number of major infrastructure projects, so we are in the same boat. Just last May we celebrated the opening of the Michael C Rockefeller Wing, which houses the Arts of Ancient America, the Arts of Africa and the Arts of Oceania in beautiful new galleries designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture.

Here is that same shot of one of the Oceanic galleries highlighting the works of First Nations artists and featuring a cluster of fifteen-foot-tall Asmat funerary bisj poles on the first day we open to the public. These galleries were overseen by Dr Maia Nuku, The Met’s Curator of Oceanic Art, and Dr Sylvia Cockburn, Senior Research Associate, who I understand is from Canberra and some of you may know her. The renovated Oceanic galleries also include a ceremonial house ceiling composed of over 170 painted sago palm leaf stems, commissioned from The Met by contemporary Kwoma artists in the village of Mariwai in the 1970s.

During the renovation of the new galleries, our curators reached out to the current generation of Mariwai artists who actively partnered with The Met in the selection of the updated ceiling display, which is now organised according to clan, according to their recommended specification. Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post wrote in his review of the newly reopened galleries, and I quote, ‘If you believe in anything like cross-cultural values or cosmopolitanism, to see the other, to want to know them and to love them as best you can are fundamental human obligations.’ End quote.

I hear echoes of Edward Steichen and The Family of Man as I say that it's exactly what I felt all those years ago sitting in the empty living room looking at that book. And what a celebration we had. We had a dawn invocation ceremony for the Oceanic Galleries involving members of all of the represented communities. It involved a procession from The Met’s Great Hall into the Rockefeller Wing at 5:30 in the morning, and everyone turned out despite the early hour.

Here you will see a Yolngu delegation led by Yinimala Gumana in front of contemporary bark paintings from the Baratjala Jala series by Senior Yolngu artist Mrs Marawili, created in 2022-23 and given to The Met last year.

On the opening day of the Wing, featuring a Māori greeting on the museum steps, we welcomed 33,000 visitors, the single highest daily attendance at The Met since 2017. Nearly two million people have visited the Wing since the end of May last year. Just an amazing statistic. We also received really excellent press coverage for the reopening. I hope it made it all the way here. And one more fantastic fact about the project, as we are celebrating International Women's Day, all of the senior curatorial team overseeing this new wing are women. As is this is, and this is even more rare, our head of capital projects, who masterminded the construction project, and of the nine members of the Mets management team, seven are women.

In 2030 we are planning to open the Tang Wing, which will transform the display of our collection of modern and contemporary art.

I would like to wrap up with two final thoughts. One is a return to the subject of women in the arts. Since this is the Betty Churcher Oration, I believe it is my job, it is our job to uplift women's contribution to the arts however we can. This is a billboard design created by the Guerilla Girls, a collective of feminist artists who maintain their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks in public in 1989. I'm sure many of you have seen this before and you don't forget it. We can actively promote the work of living artists, including our commissioned artist, some of whom I have mentioned. We could also give a platform to performing artists such as this women-centred Samba Reggae drumline. Isn't that a great combination, Samba Reggae? Called Fogo Azul, shown here at a recent Met Fest.

But we can also reach back into history and uplift the voices that still need amplification. When I was at the Getty, we presented an exhibition on Maria Sibylla Merian in 2008. Maria was a German entomologist, naturalist and artist who was one of the earliest European naturalists to document observations directly. In 1699 Maria divorced, incredibly rare at that time. Travelled alone with her daughter to Suriname, an arduous two-month journey. She spent two years there documenting local plants, insects and animals, creating an incredible body of work.

In the exhibition, curated by a woman, we celebrated both Marian's artistic and scientific contributions. The Met’s Women Dressing Women is another great example of the types of shows we need to do. The exhibition celebrated and elevated the contributions of female designers, many of whom either worked anonymously or were overshadowed by the lead male designers of fashion houses. The video presentation in this section, entitled Anonymity, documented the labour of crafting garments, illuminating the often-overlooked women at the heart of the industry.

The exhibition was curated by a woman and the entire team – the exhibition designer, the graphic designer, the editor, the exhibitions project manager – were all women. A current exhibition at The Met focuses on the incredible paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, A strikingly modern painter working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, very little known outside of her native Finland, Other important recent monographic exhibitions by women artists as varied as Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Alice Neel, Cecily Brown, and Lorna Simpson are just a few examples of this important programmatic priority for us.

And as Judy Chicago noted in her Betty Churcher Oration last year, which is highlighted in your Know My Name galleries, we didn't just present them. We also either celebrated works already in our collection or added them. That is the permanent contribution.

So that's the first. The second is to reflect on a picture I have on the wall of my office during the pandemic when The Met was closed. Our steps – such an iconic part of New York City – were transformed from the bustling to the silent. Here you see banners created by Yoko Ono that we installed during the time we were closed, that were really moving. When we finally reopened to the public very carefully at the end of August 2020, the very first visitor captured by the photographer Taylor Hill as he entered into the Great Hall was this man. I look at it every day, and every day it reminds me why I love what I do.

I think that our greatest responsibility and gift, particularly in the current moment, is to provide moments of reflection and of joy, moments of appreciation and understanding of the work of artists across time and place. Our job, I think, is to encourage people to appreciate and learn from the other, not be fearful of it, embracing instead of suppressing different cultures and cultural expressions.

Max just shared a letter that we received from a donor about an increased bequest to The Met. She explained that she supports only two institutions in New York, a local cancer hospital and The Met.

'The former', she wrote, 'saved my life. The second enriches it.' I don't think we can do any better than that. Thank you very much.

Tracy Cooper-Lavery: This has been NGA Art Talks, brought to you by the National Gallery of Australia. You can subscribe to this podcast on your favourite podcast app or listen at nga.gov.au.

This podcast is part of the National Gallery's Know My Name initiative, celebrating the contribution of all women artists to Australia's cultural life. See their art, hear their stories, and know their names.