aGOG signage

The australian Girls Own Gallery, known as aGOG, opened its doors on 16 March 1989 as a commercial gallery representing women artists only. It was housed in a complex in Leichhardt Street Kingston, which also contained the Leichhardt Street Studios, home to many Canberra artists at different times. Helen Maxwell, aGOG’s director, intended her gallery to promote and exhibit women’s art from the Canberra region and beyond. In the ten years of its operation aGOG had an important influence on art in the Canberra community. Many young artists had their first exhibition at aGOG, and Maxwell also sought out older artists, some of whom had rarely if ever exhibited their work. The Canberra commercial art world is a small one, and aGOG gave audiences significant exposure to a broad range of contemporary art practice. A number of the many artists who exhibited at aGOG are represented in the CMAG collection, including Olive Cotton, Sue Lovegrove, Victoria Clutterbuck, Pam Debenham, Marie Hagerty, Judy Horacek and eX de Medici.

Maxwell closed the doors of aGOG at the end of 1998 and went in search of a larger gallery space in which to expand and also represent male artists. In March 2000 she opened the Helen Maxwell Gallery in Mort Street, Braddon, in the building once occupied by the fledgling Australian newspaper, which Rupert Murdoch had launched in Canberra in 1964.

Signage is an important component of the CMAG collection. Commercial signs are part of the visual landscape of a city and significant objects of social history. The elegant aGOG sign is material evidence of the australian Girls Own Gallery, an important enterprise in Canberra’s cultural history; it is also symbolic of affirmative action practices that followed 1970s second-wave feminism, in the creative arts as elsewhere. Maxwell’s little gallery achieved its aims and brought artists and audiences together, and significantly advanced the potential for women working in the arts in the Canberra region and elsewhere.