Past exhibitions

Delve into our previous exhibitions

Each year our team produces an array of exhibitions highlighting our permanent collections and featuring contemporary artists. Past exhibition pages include links to research and digital catalogues for you to relive the experience online.

2023

Object/Art/Specimen

An interdisciplinary exhibition drawing on all three of the museum’s diverse collections.

Exhibition view of D Harding with Kate Harding at the Chau Chak Wing Museum

D Harding with Kate Harding: Through a lens of visitation

Exploring D Harding and Kate Harding's multi-layered practices and the artists' relationship to Carnarvon Gorge.

Black and white photograph of a man on a rocky ledge

Australian Seashores

Exploring the photography of the landmark textbook "Australian Seashores"

Instrumental 2

Using and analysing light. The second display in our ongoing series featuring scientific instruments from the Macleay Collections

Coastline

Artists have always been captivated by the ocean. In Coastline, over 40 artists take on this monumental theme, variously representing the journeys, dangers, conflicts, pleasures and politics carried by the tides.

Sentient Paper

Highlighting the communicative power of paper

2022

Instrumental

A display of scientific instruments from the Macleay Collections

Kamay (Botany Bay) spears: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Three spears taken by Lieutenant James Cook from Kamay (Botany Bay) in 1770 are on display for the first time in Sydney since they were taken more than 250 years ago.

2021

Gululu dhuwala djalkiri: welcome to the Yolŋu foundations

For Yolŋu people, knowledge is shared and demonstrated through their art. Paintings and sculptures embody their spiritual, philosophical and legal foundations.

The business of photography

Turning a lens onto the first commercial photography studios in NSW

Daniel Boyd: Pediment / Impediment

‘Pediment/Impediment’ was Contemporary Art Project #1, the inaugural exhibition in a series of new contemporary art commissions in the Chau Chak Wing Museum's Penelope Gallery.

2020 and earlier

We’ve developed a wide range of entertaining and scholarly exhibitions over the past decades.

It is possible to explore many of the past exhibitions through our collection search, and discover where our objects have been exhibited in Australian galleries and museums from around the globe.

Featured image (top of the page): Daniel Boyd, Pediment/Impediment, 2020, installation view, Penelope Gallery, Chau Chak Wing Museum.