The Vizard Foundation has supported activities in the visual arts since the early 1990s. This support has spanned a surprising range of areas: an award for promising photography students, a collection of antiquities, another of colonial silver, and the funding of teaching positions in contemporary art at the University of Melbourne. The most substantial of these activities has been the formation of the Vizard Foundation Art Collection of the 1990s.

Why contemporary art? It’s not always easy. It doesn’t always lay out a welcome mat. But what it does do is take you straight to the heart of many of the issues and ideas that drive Australians’ efforts to understand their past, present and future. The 1990s were a decade in which Australians argued long and hard about national identity. Talking about what we stood for often meant talking about what stood for us: what images and symbols represented Australian history and experience. Sometimes we encountered symbols that didn’t take: kangaroos on BMX bikes, anyone? More often, artists focussed on the symbols that we didn’t take seriously—suburban houses—or need to acknowledge more effectively—the experience of Indigenous Australians.
There is no single right way to support art. For us, collecting and displaying art seemed to be the best way to assist artists. Buying artists’ work is a vote of confidence in their efforts but it is also a declaration that cultural activity can make a genuine contribution to understanding. Looking at art is a pleasure but it is also an act of inquiry. Displaying art invites an audience to ask questions of art itself, but also to reflect on history, values and lifestyles.

The collection is not intended to make a definitive statement about the decade or Australian art in general. It reflects a process that began with an engagement with artists: listening to the questions they were asking of art and culture, recognising the significance of local experience and identity. The pleasure of this activity has been in listening and learning, looking at things differently, understanding more about contemporary art. This publication is a record of that process, and to every person engaged in it—artists, academics, museum staff, gallerists, writers—we express our profound thanks.

Steve Vizard AM Chairman, Vizard Foundation