Minali Gamage and Joshua Walters are passionate Next Collective members, who both firmly believe in and encourage youth philanthropy, but who have come to their appreciation of the Gallery from vastly differing backgrounds.
Minali, a business professional now working in the Mining sector, started visiting AGWA as a small child with her parents and as part of school groups. Joshua became engaged later, as an adult, after attending his first Art Ball – something he describes as ‘uniquely Perth’ – our equivalent of New York’s famous Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Minali says her Next Collective membership has opened up opportunities to engage one-on-one with AGWA Director, Colin Walker and Guest Artistic Director, Ian Strange, as well as some of the curatorial and AGWA Learning staff. This has given her a much stronger appreciation of the role of the Gallery in the community and the way it actually works behind the scenes. She cares deeply about the sustainability of the arts, particularly the engagement of younger people, and uses her Perth.Art.Seeker Instagram account to share Agency Performance news about the Perth arts scene and connect artists, galleries and audiences of art appreciators and collectors.
On the other hand Joshua, a ‘tech specialist’ turned artist, talks about his exhibition experiences – particularly the opportunity to see the 2012–2013 series of exhibitions of works on loan from MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Other exhibitions which captured his imagination have been the Rebels, Radicals and Pathfinders series (2018), Desert River Sea (2019), the annual portrait show The Lester Prize and the youth art exhibition Pulse Perspectives. A regular (and without doubt the youngest) attendee at the Foundation’s monthly Picture Club events, Joshua says he values the format which, thanks to the Voluntary Gallery Guides who lead the group, gives him the opportunity to engage with, and gain an indepth appreciation of the detail behind, the works of art on display, and to bounce ideas off the other participants.
Both Minali and Joshua agree that they feel privileged to be able to influence, in a small way, the Gallery’s direction, through Next Collective members’ annual pitch events, which to date have resulted in artist-led workshops delivered to schools and funded the First Nations mural to be unveiled in the foyer at the end of 2021.
