Heide’s door is always open to the public, and during 2005 the many narratives comprising the future, past and present of the Museum will be surveyed at Heide’s hearth – the original weatherboard home of John and Sunday Reed, Heide I.
HEIDE: FUTURE, PRESENT and PAST
Part I (Heide – the museum) 16 January– 31 July 2005
Part II (Heide – a home, and haven for art) 8 August 2005 – 29 January 2006
Heide’s door is always open to the public, and during 2005 the many narratives comprising the future, past and present of the Museum will be surveyed at Heide’s hearth – the original weatherboard home of John and Sunday Reed, Heide I.
Heide: Future, Present and Past resembles a physical timeline of Heide’s existence.
A preview of Heide’s future takes the form of documentation of the new buildings and landscapes designed by architects O’Connor + Houle to be unveiled as the final stage in the Museum development during 2006. The Present and Past components unravel in two distinct stages across the year.
Part I, (on display at Heide I until 31 July 2006), looks at the establishment of Heide Museum as we know it today, from the present until 1968. It returns back through time, surveying the operations and startup of Heide Park and Art Gallery, as it was titled on commencement 1981, as well as the Reeds interests while living in Heide II and including Sweeney Reed and Barrett Reid who were living at different times during this period in Heide I.
Each of Heide I’s nineteenth century rooms offers selective perspectives from this period dating back to the late 1960s: Heide as The Museum; Heide’s Collection including the modernist treasures that were part of the Reeds vision for a museum; Barrett Reid’s involvement in the visual arts and Sweeney Reed as an artist, poet and gallerist at Strines and Sweeney Reed Gallery, from which the Reeds and Barrett Reid also purchased works.
Visitors will have access to moments in the visual history of Heide’s exhibitions, activities, buildings, Kitchen Gardens, and special occasions, as well the complete range of exhibition catalogues published since 1981. A timeline marks the many key Heide events across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The development of the Museum Collection, beginning with the gifts and bequests of John and Sunday Reed and continued through the goodwill of donors large and small during the 1980s and 1990s, is signalled from works hung in what was John and Sunday’s bedroom. Works gifted by Barrett Reid, the Reeds friend, are not only significant in themselves but indicate the ongoing interest in cutting edge art maintained across the decades by the occupants and owners of Heide, as well as the many interconnections between artists, collectors, writers and critics that Sweeney Reed and Barrett Reid continued with John and Sunday and in their spirit.
Part II looks back to the first four decades of the Reed’s history at Bulleen and their importance for the development of Australian art. The lives and events preceding the establishment of the Museum, primarily being the Reeds purchase of the property in 1934, involvement with and support of artists from the 1930 s onwards, development of an art collection, building of McGlashan Everist designed modernist icon Heide II and establishment of the garden are just part of what Part II will present. The Reeds involvement with the Contemporary Art Society in the 1940s and 50s, the establishment of Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia and the Reeds desire for their property ‘Heide’ to be a place where life and culture combine infuse Heide’s past, and as this exhibition shows, Heide’s much awaited future.