Susan McCulloch
Co-director of McCulloch & McCulloch Australian Art Books, Susan McCulloch has been a book publisher and art writer since 1978. Born in London, she arrived in Australia as a child and was brought up at Shoreham, Victoria, in a house much-visited by leading international and Australian artists, writers, academics, critics and many others. She studied singing at Melbourne University Conservatorium of Music, was also an anti-war activist and in 1978 became a book publisher, co-founding Greenhouse and later McCulloch Publishing, her own independent book publishing company.
Since 1980 she has combined book publishing with writing on the arts for major Australian press including The Age, the Bulletin, the Melbourne Herald, and many other journals and magazines. She was The Australian newspaper's visual arts writer 1994-2003 and its national art critic 2003-2004.
She has managed McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art since the late 1980s and has been its co-author for its 1994 and 2006 editions.
She has a longstanding passionate interest in Aboriginal culture, has written widely on the subject and travels as often as possible to the many art-producing communities throughout Australia. Her book, McCulloch's Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide, (1999, 2001, 2008) has become a classic reference work on the subject and has now been completely updated.
In 2003 she established the publishing company Aus Art Editions (now McCulloch & McCulloch Australian Art Books) with her daughter Emily to research, write and publish the Encyclopedia and a range of other books on Australian indigenous and other visual arts. She continues to write further books and reviews for The Australian Financial Review, Australian Art Collector and Aboriginal Art Magazine.
In addition to arts writing and publishing, Susan is also a curator, a skill she developed assisting her father who founded and ran The Herald Outdoor Art Show, a large event filled with work by artists who would become known as amongst Australia's most important. Recent exhibitions she has curated include Across Country: The Ken Hinds Collection for the Caloundra Regional Gallery and McCulloch's Aboriginal Art: A Writer's Selection, with Emily, held at Flinders in 2009.
Susan is also a contributor of catalogue essays, guest speaker at exhibitions, and frequent judge of art prizes. Prizes she has judged include the Heysen Art Prize, The Alice Prize, Sunshine Coast Art Prize, The Fleurieu Art Prize, and the Paddington Art Prize.
Currently, she is currently working on a book with RMIT’s Public Art program, Outer Site: International Art in Public Space from RMIT, by Geoff Hogg, Tristian Koenig and others, judging various art prizes, writing a history of Aboriginal women’s art and working on future exhibitions and talks.
Emily McCulloch Childs
Emily is a visual arts writer, publisher and curator. She is co-author & publisher (with her mother, Susan McCulloch), of several best-selling books on Australian art, including the 4th edition of McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Australia’s largest and leading art reference book for over 40 years, originally written by her grandfather, art critic, art historian, author, artist, cartoonist, gallery director and curator, Alan McCulloch.
She has also co-authored and published, with Susan, the 3rd edition of McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide, which has been widely acclaimed for its accessible yet authoritative style, and is known as one of Australia's best-selling art books.
Emily is the author and co-publisher of New Beginnings: Classic Paintings from the Corrigan Collection of 21st Century Aboriginal Art, with an essay by Prof. Ross Gibson and foreword by Margo Neale, which was launched by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's wife Thérèse Rein in 2008.
In 2003 Emily established an art publishing and curatorial business with her mother; McCulloch & McCulloch. Together they have published two books in collaboration with Aboriginal art centres: The Heart of Everything: the art & artists of Mornington & Bentinck Islands, by Nicholas Evans, Paul Memmott & Louise Martin-Chew, and Painting the Song: Kaltjiti Artists of Sand Dune Country, by Diana James with Kaltjiti Arts. They have also produced the McCulloch’s Australian Art Diary 2009 and 2010, and the inaugural Queensland Indigenous Art Diary 2010. They are currently working on a book with RMIT’s Public Art program, Outer Site: International Art in Public Space from RMIT, by Geoff Hogg, Tristian Koenig and others.
McCulloch & McCulloch have also curated several exhibitions within the field of indigenous art, including Across Country: The Ken Hinds Cultural Collection, Caloundra Regional Gallery & touring, McCulloch's Contemporary Aboriginal Art: a writer's selection 1992–2008 in their local village of Flinders and McCulloch’s Aboriginal Art @ Salt Contemporary: A decade of Australia’s indigenous fine art 1999-2009, at Salt Contemporary Art in Queenscliff. They have an ongoing indigenous art curatorial programme with Salt Contemporary Art.
Emily’s background in Australian art stems from her grandfather, Alan McCulloch (visit Wikipedia entry), who was one of the foremost art critics of the 20th century, and whose interest in Aboriginal art led to him curating the first exhibition of bark paintings in America in 1965, and to the urging for the purchasing, restoration and exhibition of indigenous art by our state and national galleries as far back as the 1940s. Her mother Susan continued this interest in indigenous art in the 1990s, as arts writer and later critic for The Australian.
Emily has worked for galleries including Flinders Lane Gallery, which has a strong focus on the work of artists from Utopia, an area in which she has a specialised interest. She also has a particular focus on the Pintupi, Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) artists of the Western and South-Western Deserts, and indigenous artists working in cities and urban centres.
Emily completed a BA (Hons) in English at La Trobe University in 1998, minoring in Music. There she was formatively influenced in post-colonial theory and indigenous and non-indigenous interactions by her mentors Professor Leela Ghandi and Dr. David Tacey, both of whom would come to have a large influence on her later writings on art. She has worked as an editorial assistant for G.E Fabbri publishers, the Financial Mail on Sunday, the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail in London and written for Australian Art Collector, The World of Antiques & Art, The Scene, Aboriginal Art Magazine, and ArtsHub.
She is currently writing a history of Aboriginal women’s art and working on future exhibitions and talks.
Marcelle Spangaro
Administrator
Marcelle joined McCulloch and McCulloch in 2006, and is the adminstrator for the company. She co-ordinates the online sales of McCulloch & McCulloch books, and assists in many other aspects of administration.
Sandra Nobes
Book Designer
Sandra Nobes is an award-winning freelance book designer. She was shortlisted in the APA 54th Annual Book Design Awards, and her design of the latest edition of McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art was consistently noted in reviews, such as Age art critic Peter Hill's, who observed that it was Sandra's 'unobtrusive design' that made the book 'a real standout'. She is well-known as a children's book designer, designing the Tashi series, (whose author Anna Fienberg has called her the 'Goddess of Design'), as well as many non-fiction titles. Her company, Tou-Can Design, was founded with her partner, a children's book illustrator. She has worked on other books with McCulloch & McCulloch, most notably The Heart of Everything, which drew praise for its beautiful design, Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide, McCulloch's Australian Art Diary 2009, and most Painting the Song: Kaltjiti artists of the sand dune country, by Diana James and McCulloch's Australian Art Diary 2010.
