The Colour Chart

‘The Colour Chart’ is an artist-led research initiative created in dialogue with artist, curator and postdoctoral scholar Dr Léuli Eshrāghi. It addresses issues of race hierarchy, exclusion and cultural illiteracy within Australia’s visual arts sector, which overwhelmingly impact First Peoples, and other racialised and marginalised communities. 

This project involves the collation and presentation of data visualising curatorial decision-making across Australia. It focuses on addressing the absence of First Peoples and racialised peoples in leadership, and the associated effects on employment, education, public programming, acquisitions and exhibition-making. ‘The Colour Chart’ aims to start a conversation about systemic racism and selective access in the arts by interrogating the executive, curatorial and governance appointments that enable individual and collective voices to be heard, platformed, or silenced. 

UNSW Galleries will convene a cultural workers’ roundtable to develop recommendations to be issued to all the institutions included in the assembled data. It is a prompt for Australian institutions to rethink their cultural advocacy and work towards becoming platforms to engage audiences with broader social issues.

Dr Léuli Eshrāghi’s work is celebrated internationally for its exploration of embodied knowledges, ceremonial-political practices, language renewal, and hopeful futures throughout the Great Ocean. Eshrāghi is committed to developing new scholarship and strategies for complex intersectionality in leadership and curatorial practice. They recently completed a poster project that brings together a new vocabulary for Sāmoan art history, as well as the first transnational digital archive of Sāmoan art and thought. 

Banner: Photograph of Léuli Eshrāghi by Stuart Miller