Gary Sangster is a curator, writer, and museum director who has worked in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States. He was Director of Artspace, Sydney before re-locating to the US.
He has organized over 100 museum exhibitions, including several groundbreaking, collaborative projects, such as the contemporary urban Aboriginal project, Two Worlds Collide, 1985; Painting History: Komar and Melamid, 1986; The Decade Show, 1990; Promises and States of Loss, 1995; andUrban Evidence, 1996.
Sangster also has organized touring survey projects by leading international artists Mary Kelly, Kerry James Marshall, and Genevieve Cadieux. He was curator for Judith Barry’s grand prize–winning U.S. exhibition at the 8th International Biennale, Cairo, in 2001. Recent projects include Breathtaking, 2004, that explores beauty and death, and Immersion, which deals with definitions of space, time, and vision.
In 2006 he curated an exhibition at Tulane University in New Orleans, Breathing Time, about disruption and processes of recuperation and regeneration, followed by Vital Signs in 2008, which explored the interface of drawing and technology.
Recently he served as the executive director of Headlands, a world-class, multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program, and prior to that as the dean of the Art Institute of Boston. He has served as the executive director of the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore from 1996-2002. He is currently a lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW