Vivienne Binns facts for kids

Vivienne Joyce Binns (born 1940) is a famous Australian artist. She is known for her important role in the Women's Art Movement in Australia. Vivienne also uses feminism in her art and actively supports community arts projects. She mainly creates paintings.

Early Life and Education

Vivienne Binns was born in Wyong, New South Wales, Australia, in 1940. She was the youngest of five children. Her father, Norman, was in the army for five years, serving in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea. During this time, Vivienne, her mother Joyce, and her siblings lived in Young, New South Wales.

In 1945, after the war ended, the Binns family moved back to Sydney. Vivienne grew up there, first in Willoughby and then in Wollstonecraft.

From 1953, Vivienne attended North Sydney Girls High School. She then studied art at the National Art School from 1958 to 1962. After graduating, she stayed at the school to teach drawing. During this time, she explored new ideas about art, including Dadaism.

Art Career and Community Work

Vivienne Binns had her first solo art show in 1967 at Watters Gallery in Sydney. It was called Vivienne Binns: Paintings and Constructions. Some of her early, bold paintings were shown there. These works caused a lot of discussion and strong reactions from art critics. Some people found her art very shocking and unusual.

After this exhibition, Vivienne decided to take a break from painting. She became very involved in community arts. In 1973, she worked for the Community Arts Program, which was part of the Australia Council for the Arts. She traveled to different parts of Australia to find out what people needed and how art could help communities. She did a lot to encourage and support community art. She also started working with materials like vitreous enamel, which were often seen as "crafts" rather than fine art.

In 1975, she met and became friends with Lucy Lippard, a feminist art critic from the United States. This meeting influenced Vivienne greatly. She later visited New York City and connected with the women's art movement there.

From 1979, Vivienne began working as an artist-in-residence at the University of New South Wales. She then had similar roles in different places across New South Wales from 1980 to 1988.

In the late 1980s, Binns taught painting and drawing at the University of Sydney Art Workshop. In 1994, she taught at Charles Sturt University in Albury. She then moved to Canberra to teach at the Canberra School of Art.

In 1990, Vivienne traveled to central Australia. There, she learned about the creation stories, art, and culture from Pitjantjara women. Also in 1990, she received an Australian Arts Creative Fellowship. This award allowed her to research the cultural connections between Australia and the Asia-Pacific region for three years. In 1991, she spent time in Tokyo on an Australia Council residency. She also attended three South Pacific Festivals of the Arts in Rarotonga (1992), Western Samoa (1996), and Noumea (2000). These experiences inspired many of her artworks. She included references to Captain James Cook and the artists who traveled with him. She also used patterns from tapa cloth, which is a traditional bark cloth from the Pacific islands.

In 1995, she started a large series of artworks called In Memory of the Unknown Artist. This series honored the creative efforts of people who are not usually called artists. This included designers of fabrics, linoleum, carpets, and tiles. It also celebrated housewives, traditional craftspeople, street artists, and hobby artists. She continued to create works in this series throughout the 2000s.

In 2000, she lived in the Australia Council Studio in London. In 2001, she visited Europe again with help from a research grant.

In 2002, Vivienne traveled to the Kimberleys in Australia. Afterward, she included images of that landscape in her art. Sometimes, she combined these with Cook-related images and patterned surfaces. In 2003, she worked with Geoff Newton and Derek O'Connor on a series of paintings made on split canvases.

Vivienne retired from teaching in 2012.

In 2018, she had a solo exhibition called It Is What It Is at the Sutton Gallery in Melbourne.

In 2019, Vivienne Binns was interviewed for the State Library of Queensland's James C Sourris AM Collection. In this interview, she talked about her life, her art, and what inspires her.

As of July 2025, Vivienne Binns, now 84 years old, still works and paints in her studio. She works at a slower pace, but her passion for art continues.

A major exhibition of her work, Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface, opened at MUMA (Monash University Museum of Art) in February 2022. It then moved to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney in July 2022. This exhibition featured over 100 of her works, including prints, sculptures, drawings, and her earliest paintings.

Art Style and Themes

Vivienne Binns has worked with many different art forms. These include painting, printmaking, performance art, sculpture, and drawing. Her wide range of artistic work has earned her great respect among artists in Australia and around the world, especially within the feminist art community.

Painting Techniques

Throughout her career, Vivienne Binns has become well-known for her strong approach to painting. Her first solo exhibition in 1967 is seen as a key moment for the start of feminist art in Australia. This show was one of the first of its kind to bravely explore women's experiences and power through art.

Over many years, Vivienne has experimented with colors and shapes. In her paintings, she has explored big ideas like feminism and how different cultures interact. She often uses abstraction in her art. This means she uses shapes, colors, and lines instead of realistic images. This helps her share complex ideas in a way that many people can understand.

Women's Art Movement

Vivienne Binns was a leader in starting The Women's Art Movement (WAM) in Sydney. This movement began in 1973. It was inspired by an essay called "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" by Linda Nochlin. WAM wanted to fight against unfair treatment and sexism in the art world. They did this through various actions and art shows. Vivienne was one of the founding members in 1974. WAM was especially focused on keeping records of women's artworks through the Women's Art Register.

Feminism and the Women's Art Movement are very important to Vivienne's art. She once said that as a feminist, she realized that the history of women's art was not easy to find or learn about in schools.

Community Art Projects

Vivienne Binns played a big part in developing community arts in Australia. In 1972, she worked with Mike Morris and Tim Burns on The Artsmobile. This was a traveling art project that brought Dada and Surrealist-style performances to towns along the north-east coast of New South Wales. The Artsmobile offered many art activities to schools, senior centers, and public parks.

Continuing her interest in community arts, Vivienne created Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories in 1978. This project started during her time as an artist-in-residence at the University of New South Wales. She later expanded the project to the Sydney suburb of Blacktown. In this project, people could share stories about the craft and needlework skills they learned from their mothers and other family members. The final artwork was shown as a series of postcards. The project continued until 1981.

In 1983, Vivienne started another major community art project called Full Flight. She lived in a caravan for two years, traveling through the Central West region of New South Wales. She stayed in each town for two to four months, leading workshops, painting murals, and sharing skills. This project celebrated "the creativity of ordinary people."

Vivienne's interest in community arts came from her desire to make the art world open to everyone. She believed that creative expression is a natural part of being human. She felt that stopping this expression was a form of "social control." She wanted to break down the idea that art only belongs to artists and art institutions. She believed that everyone's creative expression was valuable.

In 1989, Binns began another community art project, The Tower of Babel, at the Watters Gallery. It started with 50 small dioramas, created by herself and her friends, mentors, students, and acquaintances. This project is still ongoing as of 2022, and now includes 90 boxes.

In 1991, Vivienne Binns was the main editor of a book called Community and the Arts: History, Theory, Practice. This book was a guide for people working in community arts.

Awards and Recognition

The Australia Council has said that Vivienne Binns was one of the first Australian artists to seriously explore feminism in her art. She also helped start conversations between Australian art and international feminist art.

In 1983, Vivienne received an Order of Australia Medal for her contributions to Art and Craft. She also won the Ros Bower Memorial Award in 1985 for her important work in Community Arts.

In 1990, she was given an Australian Arts Creative Fellowship. This award helped her research the cultural connections between Australia and the Asia-Pacific for three years.

Her work was chosen for important art prizes like the John McCaughey Memorial Prize (2008) and the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award (2009) at the National Gallery of Victoria.

In 2021, Vivienne Binns received an Australia Council Award for Visual Arts.

Exhibitions

Vivienne Binns has been part of many art exhibitions for over fifty years.

Solo Exhibitions

• 1967 Paintings and Constructions, Watters Gallery, Sydney
• 1971 Funky Enamel Ashtrays, Watters Gallery, Sydney
• 1973 Enamel Panels, University of Tasmania, Hobart and Raffins Gallery, Orange, New South Wales
• 1985 Watters Gallery, Sydney
• 1990 Drawings of God, Tower of Babel, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane
• 1992 Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
• 1994 Surfacing in the Pacific, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane
• 1995 Pacific Strands, Australian Girls' Own Gallery (aGOG), Canberra
• 1996 Slicing History in the Pacific, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane
• 1996 In Memory of the Unknown Artist and Others, Watters Gallery, Sydney
• 1999 PATTERNING: In Memory of Unknown Artists, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
• 1999 TRANSLATIONS: Remembering Unknown Artists, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane
• 1999 Rocks and Relics: Cook to Lake Cargelligo, The Cube, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra
• 2004 Vivienne Binns: Twenty First Century Paintings, curated by Merryn Gates, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney
• 2005 Some New, Some Old, Some Collaborations, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
• 2006-8 Vivienne Binns, touring exhibition curated by Merryn Gates, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; The Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra; Penrith Regional Gallery, Penrith, NSW; and Bathurst Regional Gallery, Bathurst, NSW
• 2008 Everything New is Old Again, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
• 2012 Vivienne Binns, Art and Life (mini –Survey), curated by Penny Peckham, La Trobe University Museum of Art, Melbourne
• 2018 It is what it is what it is, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
• 2022 Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface, MUMA, Melbourne, then Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney

Group Exhibitions

• 1971 Woom, environmental lightshow with Roger Foley (Ellis D Fogg), Watters Gallery, Sydney
• 1972 The Jo Bonomo Story - A Show of Strength, a group happening, Watters Gallery, Sydney
• 1978 An exhibition of work by homosexual and lesbian artists, Watters Gallery, Sydney
• 1980 Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories, Blacktown artist in community and participation project, Watters Gallery, Sydney; Ewing and George Paton Galleries, University of Melbourne, Melbourne
• 1981 Australian Perspecta, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
• 1981-83 Full-Flight, artist-in-community in the central western region of NSW
• 1982 Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
• 1987 Contemporary Art in Australia A Review, Museum of Contemporary Art, South Brisbane
• 1991 Frames of Reference: Aspects of Feminism and Art, Pier 4/5, Sydney
• 1996 Women Hold Up Half the Sky: The Orientation of Art in the Post-War Pacific, MUMA, Melbourne
• 1997 I had a Dream: Australian Art in the 1960s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
• 1998 Patterning: Layers of Meaning in Contemporary Art, curated by Merryn Gates, touring to Canberra; Bandung, Jakarta, Ubud, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; Lahore, Pakistan; and Manila, Philippines
• 2000 On the Brink: Abstraction in the 90’s, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
• 2007 Cross Currents: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
• 2012 Sixties Explosion, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney
• 2014 Binns + Valamanesh, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney
• 2015 Pop to Popism, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
• 2017-18 Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art & Feminism, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

Major Art Collections

Vivienne Binns' artwork is held in many important private and public collections. These include:

• Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
• Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
• Australian National University, Canberra
• BHP, Melbourne
• Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra
• Griffith University Art Collection, Queensland
• Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne
• Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
• Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
• National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
• Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle, New South Wales
• Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra
• Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, Queensland
• Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
• University Art Gallery, Queensland University, Brisbane
• University of Western Australia, Cruthers Collection of Women's Art
• Wesfarmers, Perth