A brief biography
Linda Slutzkin devoted her life to helping people appreciate art.
She was born in Sydney in 1950, into an extended family of Russian Jews, which had emigrated to Australia earlier in the century, among whom was her uncle, Robert Shaw, the sponsor of John Olsen’s first trip to Europe.
Her father, Alex, was a publican, and, her mother, Joan, a former fashion model, who had studied art at East Sydney Technical College. With her older sisters, Jenna and Michelle, Linda grew up in Cammeray, in a home full of artworks. When she attended Willoughby Girls High School, her interest in art was furthered by her teacher, Jill Mercer, and led to her studying at East Sydney Technical College and Alexander Mackie College, from which she graduated with a Diploma of Art Education. In her final year at college, she met the filmmaker, Albie Thoms, at the Yellow House, beginning a relationship that continued for the rest of her life.
After a year teaching in Moree she attended the Nimbin Festival, then joined Thoms in Europe, where he was screening one of his films. She stayed on, visiting art museums, before going to work on a socialist kibbutz in Israel.
On her return to Sydney, Linda resumed teaching, lecturing in art history at East Sydney Technical College and moved, with Thoms, into a flat in Little Sirius Cove in Mosman, where neighbours later included the filmmaker Jan Chapman, the painter Imants Tillers and the wildflower enthusiast Jenny Slatyer. It overlooked the site of the Curlew Camp, the home of the Australian Impressionist painters, which later became the subject of her landmark education exhibition, Bohemians in the Bush, and once had been the home of the painter, Freda Robertshaw, whose career she documented for the publication, Heritage – the National Women‘s Art Book, inspiring a major revaluation this artist‘s work.
In 1975, she visited Bali, staying in Kuta, when it was a tiny village with dirt lanes, and in 1976, spent six months in Paris with Thoms at the Cité Internationale des Arts, studying at the Alliance Française, and making daily visits to art museums.
In 1978, she became an Education Officer at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), which was similar to letting a child loose in a chocolate factory. At first she had responsibility for the Travelling Art Exhibition, showing works from the Gallery‘s collection in regional areas of the state. For this programme, she curated the exhibitions On the Beach and Interiors, using works from the Gallery‘s collection, as well as In the Making, which featured younger artists such as Brett Whiteley and Martin Sharp, together with documentation of their work practices.
During this time, she lobbied for the establishment of regional art museums to permanently display such works and, when this became a reality, she returned to the Gallery, devising education programmes for secondary school students, with such innovatory exhibitions as The Printmaker‘s Studio, The Sculptor‘s Studio and The Still Life Studio, enabling students to appreciate the process of art making as well as its content. She also encouraged the appreciation of film as an artform, with such programmes as the Australian Women Filmmakers series, featuring emerging talents, such as Gillian Armstrong, who later became her neighbour in Balmoral, while curating a Charles Meere Retrospective for the S.H. Ervin Gallery and Helen Eager Prints and Drawings for the Orange Regional Gallery.
Somehow she found time for picnics, parties and wild nights in the bohemian atmosphere of Arthur‘s restaurant in Kings Cross, where she mixed socially with painters, filmmakers and musicians, many of whom became her close friends. While doing these things, she discovered a melanoma on her ankle and, despite the threat of it spreading, had it removed and got on with her work. Soon after she gave birth to her children, Lara and Tommy, whom she nurtured with the same love and devotion that she brought to art education.
When she became Head of Public Programmes at the AGNSW in 1987, she initiated a wide range of activities to utilise the expanded capacity provided by the Gallery‘s new wing. These included a dedicated Education Gallery, artist-in-residence programmes, stage productions and film exhibitions, as well as extended activities for primary, secondary and tertiary students. To this end she employed a devoted team of young art educators, whom she inspired with her unbounded enthusiasm for art appreciation, and mothered them through the crises that eventuated from the intensive undertakings set for them. These included a dynamic publications programme, with a new gallery bulletin, and comprehensive education kits for ‘blockbusters‘, temporary exhibitions and the permanent collection, as well as the writing of the instructional text Making Your Mark, for Science Press. She also undertook the training of information officers and volunteer guides, while running the Master of Arts Administration course at the College of Fine Arts (University of New South Wales), inspiring a new generation of curators and gallery managers, while finding time to serve on the William Fletcher Trust, providing grants to art students to enable them to develop their skills.
In 1995, Linda‘s innovatory approach to art education led to he being invited to lecture on the subject in London, after which she went with Thoms to Belle-Île, in Brittany, to explore the environment of the painter John Russell, for an exhibition and a film. But her battles with the patriarchal culture of the AGNSW eventually took their toll and, after a period as a staff union representative, striving to improve working conditions and pay, she decided she had had enough and left the Gallery in 1997 to become a freelance art consultant.
Working from a home office in a house at Balmoral that she had acquired with Thoms, surrounded by angophoras and overlooking a native garden she had planted and a council nature strip she had rescued from lantana, she serviced clients such as Lend Lease, AMP, Aria and the Sydney Airports Corporation, as well as the Max Dupain Negative Archive, for which she designed and published an impressive portfolio on posthumous prints. She also returned to Paris to lecture for the Art Gallery Society‘s Artists of Paris tours and began focusing her attention on the then-neglected art of photography, running seminars on collecting photography at the AGNSW and Sothebys, and curating the exhibitions Max Dupain‘s Manly, for the Manly Regional Museum, and Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives and Women of Macarthur, for the Department of Women, while advising the photographers, Jill White, Jon Lewis, Lorrie Graham, Paola Talbot and Sandy Edwards on their exhibitions.
In 2004 her melanoma returned, beginning the roller-coaster ride that was the rest of her life. It involved three operations, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and hundred of pills and vitamins every day, all to no avail. Despite her illness she maintained her enthusiasm for art appeciation and continued to offer the benefits of her extensive experience to others, with the same direct speaking and wry humour that had characterised her life.
– Albie Thoms 1941–2012