A vibrant place in the heart of the city, Canberra Museum and Gallery celebrates the region's social history and visual arts with dynamic exhibitions and unique community programs and events.

Housing a permanent collection, Reflecting Canberra, and a variety of local, national and international exhibitions, CMAG provides a refreshing insight to the integration of social history and the visual arts.

Exhibitions

CMAG Collection Series: Social History

20 April – 29 June 2008
Gallery 5

Canberra Museum and Gallery opened in February 1998. Over the past ten years CMAG has produced some 260 exhibitions and acquired a permanent collection that reflects the cultural life of the Australian Capital Territory community. People, things and events configure to become a record of the times in which we live, elements that mould community character, identity and sense of place.

CMAG’s charter is to explore and integrate the social history and visual arts of the Canberra region. Its collection contains objects that bring the past into the present by provoking memory. The museum itself may be seen as a repository for the collective memory of our community.

Upon entry into the CMAG permanent collection an object’s original purpose and individual connections are overlaid with new relevance as museum objects. Their new voice
speaks to all who gather objects of memory. This exhibition is selected from the social history collection. It acknowledges the objects original purpose and explores our need to keep things as evidence of experience.