New England Regional Art Museum

About

The New England Regional Art Museum, known as NERAM, is a museum of Australian art located in Armidale in the New England region of New South Wales. NERAM's art collections are the second largest and most valuable regional public collection in NSW after the Newcastle Art Gallery. NERAM's collections are valued in excess of A$25 million. The NERAM complex is a significant cultural tourism destination that includes six gallery spaces, a Museum of Printing, an artist-in-residence studio, educational facilities, shop and café.

NERAM opened in 1983. The museum was purpose-built to house and exhibit the collections of its two main benefactors, Howard Hinton and Chandler Coventry, as well as the existing Armidale City Art Collection and the NERAM Collection.

The Armidale community ran a long-term fundraising effort to build a dedicated museum as a home for these collections, and with matching grants from the NSW State government NERAM was formally opened by the Premier of New South Wales, Neville Wran, on 26 March 1983.

NERAM was built on land within the Newling Moran Reserve, NSW Crown Land that was formerly part of the Armidale Teachers College precinct, the original home of the Howard Hinton Collection. NSW Government Architect's Special Projects Division, under its Director Andrew Andersons and Project Architect David Turner, prepared detailed sketch plans, and Armidale firm Magoffin and Deakin prepared the working drawings and specifications and supervised construction.

In 1997 a Stage II extension designed by architect Colin Still was added to increase display areas, heighten the building's indoor/outdoor relationships, and include a café and artist’s studio.

NERAM is the custodian of several important collections of Australian art:

- The Howard Hinton Collection of Australian art from the 1880s to the 1940s

- The Chandler Coventry Collection of Australian art from the 1960s and 1970s

- The NERAM Collection of Australian art from the Twentieth century to the present day

- The Museum of Printing collection including the F.T. Wimble & Co. Collection of printing type and equipment. These collections bring together over 4,500 works with particular strengths in nineteenth and twentieth century Australian art. They include significant works by artists including Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Nora Heysen, Elioth Gruner, Margaret Preston, Brett Whiteley, James Gleeson, Tony Tuckson, and Christo.

Sydney-based collector and benefactor Howard Hinton OBE began donating pictures to the Armidale Teacher’s College in 1929. He aimed to "illustrate comprehensively the development of Australia art" from 1880. His gifts to the College finally totalled over 1,000 works following his death in 1948. By the 1970s it was evident that these valuable and significant works required secure housing, curatorship, preservation and environmental management not available within the open doors and corridors of a teacher’s college.

Barry Pearce, former head curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales described the Hinton donation as including "many magnificent Australian landscapes by a range of major and minor artists... crowned by such masterpieces as Arthur Streeton 's Morning Sketch (aka McMahon's Point Ferry) 1890 and Near Streeton's camp at Sirius Cove, 1892 and, the jewel in the crown, Mosman's Bay, 1894 by Tom Roberts."

In 2016 a significant donation of 11 works by seminal artists of the Hinton period was made to NERAM by arts benefactor John Gale OBE to complement the Hinton collection.

In February 2018 a permanent Hinton Collection exhibition - featuring a dense salon-hang of over a hundred and thirty of the most iconic works from the Hinton Collection - was opened in the museum's refurbished East Gallery by former Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Edmund Capon. Major works from the Hinton donation will be progressively cycled through this gallery. Commentators have declared that this opening "establishes NERAM in the top rank of galleries outside the [Australian] capital cities."

Sydney gallerist Chandler Coventry, described as a "quintessential country boy who became a leader in cutting edge contemporary art" was a driving force in the campaign to establish NERAM in his hometown.

Coventry grew up in the Armidale area — his "earliest encounters with ‘high art’ were through the Howard Hinton Collection, which he saw as a schoolchild displayed in the rooms and corridors of the Armidale Teachers’ College."

An art collector like Hinton, Coventry also established Coventry Gallery (1971-1999) in Paddington, Sydney where he displayed artworks by leading Australian and international artists including Howard Arkley and Christo.

In 1981 he offered his personal collection of 300 artworks, described as "one of the most important collections of contemporary Australian art" on the understanding that an art museum would be built to house both his and Hinton's collections.

Coventry, a survey exhibition in 2020 at NERAM explored his legacy and included the 1983 Archibald Prize winning Portrait of Chandler Coventry by artist Nigel Thompson as well as works by Angus Nivison, Martin Sharp, Janet Dawson, Peter Booth and Brett Whiteley.

Sydney-based collector and benefactor Howard Hinton OBE began donating pictures to the Armidale Teacher’s College in 1929. He aimed to "illustrate comprehensively the development of Australia art" from 1880. His gifts to the College finally totalled over 1,000 works following his death in 1948. By the 1970s it was evident that these valuable and significant works required secure housing, curatorship, preservation and environmental management not available within the open doors and corridors of a teacher’s college.