University Curator awarded prestigious travel fellowship

Ms Bosse said she was fortunate have been awarded a 2010 Churchill Fellowship to develop new curatorial models for Australian art museums to work with Indigenous artists and their communities.

Created by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the Fellowship provided financial support to fund international travel.

The fellowships are awarded to individuals who want to develop their existing expertise by undertaking international research and bring newly acquired knowledge back to benefit their work in Australia.

Ms Bosse said few opportunities exist for such focussed and open-ended research and learning.

"Fellows form contacts which become professionally sustaining, especially if their work involves new ideas, techniques or approaches which are not well established in Australia," she said.

During her time away, Ms Bosse met museum professionals, Native and First Nations artists and community consultants, curators and scholars.

She visited museums, cultural and study centres, contemporary art spaces and university galleries to learn about the processes of working more collaboratively with Native and First Nations artists and their communities.

Ms Bosse said the fellowship was an extension of her work at the Ian Potter Museum of Art during the past seven years.

"My interest in developing curatorial practice in this area has evolved from my experience of the challenges involved with institutions forming relationships with indigenous artists that are able to incorporate their perspectives and respond to their priorities," she said.

Key projects have included exhibitions of contemporary art by Indigenous artists and the display of Indigenous artworks from the recent past held in the University’s Leonhard Adam Collection of International Indigenous Culture.

Ms Bosse is curating an exhibition drawn from this rarely seen, extraordinary collection for display in March next year.

Ms Bosse said it was challenging for museums to develop practices which incorporated ways of thinking outside their frameworks.

"Consultation produces dialogues that create exciting new opportunities for the representation of art and culture," she said.