Visiting Creatives Program

Photo of the exterior a building with large floor to ceiling windows and native trees at the front

In partnership with the National Gallery of Australia, the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia (AFNGA), has announced New York painter and sculptor Dana Schutz as the latest participant in the AFNGA: Visiting Creatives Program.

The AFNGA: Visiting Creatives Program builds on four decades of close cultural ties between the National Gallery and the United States of America and is designed to deepen the transformational impact of cross-cultural exchange and creative collaboration between the two countries.

Each year, the program brings influential American arts practitioners to Australia to engage with the national collection and the broader arts community. Participants in the Visiting Creatives Program work closely with National Gallery curators to explore the national collection, focusing on First Nations and contemporary Australian art. They also are able to engage with the National Gallery’s significant collection of post-war American art, including Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles and the Kenneth E. Tyler Collection, one of the most important bodies of American printmaking outside the U.S.

Known for constructing complex visual narratives through figurative works, Schutz will be the third artist to visit the National Gallery as part of the program, following Jeff Koons and Jeffrey Gibson in 2025. Michigan-born and New York-based, Schutz is one of the most significant painters of our time. Exploring themes including anxiety, melancholy, and power from fantastical or dystopian worlds, Schutz has gained recognition for allegorical works, leaning into unpredictability and visceral gestures to capture a sense of unease across painting, clay, bronze, drawing and printmaking.

Schutz’s visit to Kamberri/Canberra follows the National Gallery’s recent acquisitions of her large-scale bronze sculpture Sea Group in 2024, followed by a suite of prints, eight technically innovative and textural etchings made after her paintings in 2025.

On 26 November 2026, Schutz will join Director Nick Mitzevich for an in-conversation event during her visit to the National Gallery of Australia. During her conversation, Schutz will provide insights into her practice, and her works in the national collection.

Ranging from artists, curators, critics, academics, and other cultural leaders, one to two influential individuals will be selected each year to participate in the Visiting Creatives Program. Their visits, funded by the AFNGA through the generous support of the Pratt Foundation, will involve cultural exchange at the National Gallery in Kamberri/Canberra, with opportunities for interstate travel to deepen their understanding of Australian contemporary art practices.

Dana Schutz, Photo: Jason Schmidt, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

DANA SCHUTZ

Dana Schutz (b. 1976) is a New York–based painter and sculptor who constructs complex, allegorical visual narratives that engage the capacity of art to represent subjective experience. Often depicting figures in seemingly impossible, enigmatic, or invented situations, her works reveal the deeper complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life. A major traveling exhibition of the artist’s work, Dana Schutz: The Visible World, was presented at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, in 2023, and traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris later that year. This past July, she opened an exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, titled Trouble and Appearance, which featured new large-scale charcoal drawings. Schutz was born in Livonia, Michigan, and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and her MFA from Columbia University, New York.

Jeff Koons, image supplied by the artist

JEFF KOONS

Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955, studied art in Chicago, Illinois and now lives and works in New York City. Koons is known for challenging the limitations of fabrication while transforming everyday images and objects into works of art that engage the viewer in a dialogue with the time in which we live and our historical past. For four decades, Koons has created works that explore themes of self-acceptance and transcendence. Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, Koons’s work has been shown in galleries, museums, and cultural institutions throughout the world. Koons’s work is in numerous collections around the world. Koons is widely known for his bold paintings and sculptures, including Rabbit 1986, Michael Jackson and Bubbles 1988, Puppy 1992 and Balloon Dog 1994. The smooth, mirror-finished surfaces of his iconic stainless-steel sculptures reflect and affirm viewers and their environments. A dialogue with the readymade is evident in his complex paintings that often employ bright, saturated color, communicating the artist’s interest in art history, the biological, and acceptance. Jeff Koons has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of his cultural achievements and philanthropic efforts.

Jeffrey Gibson © Jeffrey Gibson, courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Roberts Projects, photographer: Brian Barlow

JEFFREY GIBSON

Jeffrey Gibson grew up in major urban centres in the United States, Germany, and Korea, and he now lives and works near the Hudson Valley region of New York state. For over two decades, Gibson has evolved an aesthetic that examines our armatures of meaning, from language and text to pattern and music, and how they act as interlocutors with the world around us. He is celebrated for his work in painting, video, performance, and installation, which combine vibrant color, complex pattern, and both sourced and original text with found objects and sound to invoke and interweave such disparate contexts as faith-based spaces of communion and night clubs. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others, and has been exhibited widely, including the 2024 U.S. Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, where he was selected to represent the United States with a solo exhibition. He holds an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London (1998) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995). Gibson has received many distinguished awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019) and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2012).