Daniel von Sturmer
The field equation 2006, Monash Collection

THEY are Aladdin’s Caves of amazing treasures, much of it largely hidden from the public gaze. Few outsiders know that Australia’s universities hold vast collections of art — notable for their wide-ranging and eclectic nature and value. Overcoming this invisibility was a key reason Monash University relocated its art gallery from its rather remote Clayton campus to its more accessible art precinct in Caulfield, where an architect-designed museum opened last month Thousands of motorists on busy Dandenong Road cannot miss the museum’s super-scaled art work by Callum Morton, Silverscreen, which fronts the campus. Evocative of a drive-in theatre gantry from the 1960s, the work is sited at the Monash University Museum of Art, where a large MUMA sign ensures no one is in doubt about what’s inside. Advertisement: Story continues below “The new, enlarged museum will make its riches available to a much wider public and will encourage the participation of new audiences, patrons and supporters to its active programs,” says Monash vice-chancellor Ed Byrne. Writing in the catalogue for the museum’s opening exhibition, Professor Byrne says MUMA’s new building allows an expanded presentation of the university’s collection, “which, notwithstanding its reputation within the visual arts community, is a hidden treasure awaiting wider discovery”. Museum director Max Delany says the exhibition’s title, Change, reflects the move to the new location and presents a challenge: “To us to change our minds, our thinking, our behaviour, our ways of being, ourselves. This appeal to our senses is among the most vital roles contemporary art can play and a guiding principal of the Monash art collection since its establishment in 1961