NEWCASTLE ART GALLERY

The Newcastle Art Gallery is without doubt a well loved and appreciated Newcastle icon located in the heartland of the Newcastle Civic precinct.

The building houses an important collection of early Australian paintings bequeathed to the people of Newcastle by Dr Roland Pope in 1945. At that time no gallery was available in Newcastle to house the collection but in 1957 the collection was opened in the Art Deco Cultural Centre building adjacent to the current Art Gallery.

In 1977 Queen Elizabeth II opened the current gallery in Laman Street and at the time it was Australia’s first purpose built regional gallery and included innovative features such as the hanging system and floor layout. Finding sufficient storage space however has always remained a concern as the Gallery has now over 5000 works of art and can only display a small proportion of those works at any one given time.

The current upgrade proposal for the gallery will again see Newcastle embrace innovation with the provision of an expanded gallery as the central focus of a revitalized Civic precinct.

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