Emerging Writers

The aim of the Emerging Writers Program is to professionally support emerging arts writers who are committed to a career in the arena of contemporary art and criticism. This program contributes to the growth of a rich and insightful critical culture around contemporary art, providing participants with professional development and mentorship. This is the longest-running program of its kind in Australia and offers unparalleled access to professional networks and the opportunity to publish in some of Australia's leading arts publications and organisations.

Gertrude Emerging Writers have been published in Art Monthly Australia, eyeline, unMagazine, Discipline, West Space Journal, Vault, Dissect and Realtime.

From 2013–2016, The Copyright Agency Cultural Fund was a major supporter of the Emerging Writers Program.

Emerging Writers Program 2020

Gertrude Contemporary is pleased to relaunch the Emerging Writers Program, an initiative focused on facilitating professional development for early practice arts writers committed to pursuing a career in the arena of contemporary art and criticism. First initiated in 2005, the program has since this time connected 47 writers with 43 mentors towards the research, development and publication of new pieces of writing on artists’ practices, exhibitions and contemporary arts discourse in Australia. Over the past 15 years the cast of contributing mentors to the program represents many of the most important and influential figures of the Australian art world, including prominent institutional directors and curators, philosophers, cultural critics, journal editors, and independent writers and curators.

For the 2020 program, emphasis shifted away from focusing on writing about individual artists and exhibitions, and instead cast broader speculative perspectives upon the repositioning and potential futures in light of the current pandemic, and shifting global political landscape. Towards this, writers will be connected with individual mentors and embark on a process of researching and writing essays with the support, guidance and critical contributions of the invited 2020 mentors. Writers will be encouraged to develop new pieces of writing that reflect upon the current and future impacts of the evolving health pandemic and economic crisis on the realms of arts and culture. Essays might reflect upon the impacts and envisaged changes to how art is experienced and consumed, how and for whom it is produced, what physical contexts might remain for it, and how this situation might contribute to or amplify a shift away from experiencing art in real life. 

Gertrude Contemporary was thrilled to partner with leading publisher ART INK towards the publication of the outcomes of the Gertrude Emerging Writers Program in late 2020.

2020 Mentors

Tristen Harwood

Tara McDowell

Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Founding Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University. She lectures and publishes widely, and has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. She received a PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book, The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess, was published by MIT Press in 2019, and in 2018 The Artist As was published by Sternberg Press.

Lisa Radford

Natalie Thomas
Natalie Thomas is an artist and writer who maintains a diverse and independent practice that maintains storytelling as the basis of culture. Her work engages with the mass media and its role in how we see each other and the world. nat&ali (1999–2005) was a collaboration that riffed with riot grrrl strategies. nattysolo (one woman, one camera, no film) is an ongoing endurance performance project that manifests in equal measures as social pages and social archive, fusing gossip and innuendo with astute cultural criticism.