There is a quiet but consequential argument embedded in the design of the Gallery of Modern Art from the moment it opened in December 2006: that a major civic art institution does not serve its community fully unless it makes space — real, dedicated, purposefully designed space — for its youngest members. Most cultural institutions treat children as a secondary public, a demographic to be managed during school holidays or accommodated with a corner of activity sheets near the café. GOMA chose a different premise. When Sydney-based architecture firm Architectus completed the building on Kurilpa Point, the Children’s Art Centre was not an afterthought or an amenity bolted on for convenience. It was a founding feature of the institution’s civic identity.

That choice has consequences which accumulate quietly over time. A child who enters the Children’s Art Centre at four months of age — which the Art Starters program makes possible — and who continues to engage with the space across childhood, is not simply acquiring familiarity with a particular building. They are being inducted into a relationship with visual culture that most adults never quite find. The gallery is arguing, in the most practical way imaginable, that aesthetic literacy is not a luxury or a later-life refinement. It is a form of thinking that can be cultivated from the earliest months of consciousness, and that a publicly funded institution has an obligation to begin that cultivation as early as possible.

This article is not about GOMA’s blockbuster international exhibitions, its role in the Asia Pacific Triennial, or the architectural arguments of its riverside building — those dimensions of the institution are addressed elsewhere in this topical series. This article is about something smaller in scale but arguably more structurally significant: the specific proposition that a state gallery makes when it commits, in perpetuity, to treating children as a primary audience.

A BUILDING DESIGNED FOR EVERYONE.

When the Gallery of Modern Art opened on 2 December 2006, it did so as Australia’s largest gallery of modern and contemporary art. The building, designed by Architectus following an international competition commissioned by the Queensland Government in 2002, was conceived as a civic space of genuine openness. The architects described their approach as seeking to place the institution “in the public experience of the city” — a building impressive and monumental without being intimidating, international yet responsive to the southeast Queensland context.

That civic ambition was not rhetorical. From its opening, GOMA positioned itself as home to several distinct but co-existing publics: the serious contemporary art audience seeking international exhibitions, the film community served by the Australian Cinémathèque, and — with equal institutional seriousness — families with children of every age. The Children’s Art Centre was part of the original building’s program, not a later addition. It occupies dedicated ground-floor space within GOMA, physically integrated into the museum rather than partitioned from it, and its exhibitions rotate in the same institutional cycle as the broader gallery program.

Entry to the Children’s Art Centre is always free, per QAGOMA’s official policy — a commitment that reflects the broader Queensland government position that access to cultural life at the state’s premier visual arts institution should not be conditioned on financial means. That universality of access is a civic statement. It is also a practical one: a centre that admits children without charge, in a building embedded in South Bank’s Queensland Cultural Centre, becomes part of the regular landscape of childhood for Brisbane families in a way that a ticketed space never could.

THE INSTITUTION'S COMMITMENT TO CHILDHOOD AS AUDIENCE.

Wikipedia’s entry on the Queensland Art Gallery notes that the Gallery “is recognised as an international leader in presenting innovative museum-based learning programs for children,” and that these programs are coordinated through the Children’s Art Centre. That recognition is not incidental. It reflects a sustained institutional commitment over decades — one that predates GOMA itself and was given a permanent physical home when the second building opened.

The Children’s Art Centre’s programming philosophy rests on a principle that Australian art institutions rarely state so plainly: that babies are a valid audience for art. The Art Starters program, designed for babies aged from four months until their first birthday, embodies this position. According to QAGOMA’s published program description, the sessions involve a guided tour of current exhibitions with games, song and movement, followed by a multi-sensory interactive play session. The program acknowledges explicitly — and this is worth pausing on — that infants can be “stimulated and engaged while looking at art” in meaningful ways. The maximum capacity of twelve babies per session is not merely a logistical constraint; it reflects a curatorial seriousness about the quality of each infant’s experience.

This is an unusual institutional claim. Most museums that offer programs for very young children treat the exercise as parental community service — a pleasant morning out for caregivers, with the child as passive beneficiary. QAGOMA’s framing is different. The gallery is asserting that the infant encounter with art has its own developmental validity, independent of what the accompanying parent is experiencing. The art is for the baby too.

The progression of programs across early childhood reinforces this logic. Art Play Date, designed for toddlers aged one to three years, uses songs, movement and sensory play to explore elements such as colour, texture, sound and movement. Art Explorers, for children aged three to five, takes a more structured approach: children learn about a specific artwork and the artist who made it through interactive discussion, games and storytelling, then undertake a guided walk through the gallery to see the artwork and participate in a craft activity inspired by what they have seen. The sequence across these programs — from sensory immersion to structured looking to responsive making — describes a coherent early arts education framework embedded inside a contemporary art museum.

ARTISTS AS COLLABORATORS.

What distinguishes the Children’s Art Centre from a conventional museum education program is the role of artists in its construction. The Centre does not simply adapt existing exhibitions for younger audiences, although it does connect its program to the broader gallery schedule. It commissions and develops projects specifically designed for children, in genuine collaboration with practising contemporary artists who bring the same intellectual seriousness to this work as they do to any other commission.

The exhibition record of the Children’s Art Centre across recent years makes this concrete. The ‘Superpowered’ exhibition, which ran until July 2023, brought together four interactive projects by Indigenous Australian artists — Kaylene Whiskey (Yankunytjatjara people), Tony Albert (Girramay/Yidinyji/Kuku Yalanji peoples), Gordon Hookey (Waanyi people) and Vincent Namatjira (Western Aranda people) — who use their artistic practice to empower Aboriginal people and create inspirational imagery specifically for young audiences. The ‘Brian Robinson: Lag | Malu | Daparr (Land | Sea | Sky)’ project featured the work of Australian artist Brian Robinson, inspired by his Torres Strait Islander heritage and the tropical marine environment surrounding Waiben (Thursday Island). These are not simplified works made down to a perceived child audience. They are full artistic propositions, developed by artists whose practices are shown in the same building’s major exhibition galleries, now directed with specificity toward the youngest visitors.

The 2024 program included ‘Natalya Hughes: The Castle of Tarragindi’, in which the Australian artist created paintings, textiles, sculptures and installations informed by decorative and ornamental traditions, generating an immersive interior that drew on art history within the Children’s Art Centre space. The same year brought ‘Jakkai Siributr: The Legend of the Rainbow Stag’, in which the Thai artist’s animation — developed in collaboration with the Centre’s team — invited children to create personalised versions of the story by embellishing templates and scanning their images. Neither of these projects could be described as educational decoration. They are works of contemporary art that happen to have been made for children.

This pattern of commissioning serious artists to develop dedicated children’s projects carries a philosophical argument: that the intellectual and aesthetic demands of good contemporary art are not incompatible with a child audience. They may, in certain respects, be particularly well matched. Children are not yet habituated to the passive spectatorship that gallery culture sometimes demands of adults. They come without learned responses. They engage physically, emotionally and immediately. The best Children’s Art Centre projects seem to understand this.

THE QUESTION OF FREE ACCESS.

The civic dimension of the Children’s Art Centre cannot be understood without returning to the question of cost. Entry to the Children’s Art Centre is, as QAGOMA’s official communications state, always free. This is a distinct commitment from the gallery’s general free-access policy, which covers most exhibitions and programs but includes some ticketed events. The Children’s Art Centre sits outside that structure entirely: its permanent free status is an institutional promise that the space will not become the province of families with discretionary spending capacity.

In an era when the costs of cultural participation have quietly risen across Australian cities — when the assumption that a family outing to a museum or gallery is an affordable, readily accessible part of ordinary civic life has been eroded by transport costs, café prices and exhibition tickets — the maintained commitment to free entry at the Children’s Art Centre is worth naming as a policy position. It reflects a Queensland government and institutional view that early childhood engagement with visual art is a public good, not a consumer product. The choice to hold that line, across nearly two decades of operation, is a form of civic argument sustained through practice.

The programming fees for structured sessions such as Art Starters and Art Play Date are nominal — in the vicinity of ten dollars per child — and structured so that accompanying parents and carers attend without charge. Gallery members receive discounted rates. These are not costs that erect a meaningful barrier to participation. The model is closer to what a public library charges for a reading program than what a private art school charges for instruction.

INTO THE PRECINCT: THE BIG HOSE AND THE EXTENSION OF THE ARGUMENT.

In September 2025, QAGOMA unveiled what it described as the first permanent artist-led, interactive play sculpture in Queensland’s Cultural Centre: The Big Hose 2022–25, a collaborative creation of Tony Albert (Brisbane, Girramay/Yidinyji/Kuku Yalanji peoples) and Nell (Sydney). The sculpture — an oversized 119-metre-long garden hose — sits on the banks of the Brisbane River at Kurilpa Point, a traditional meeting and trading place for the region’s Turrbal and Yaggera peoples, just outside the GOMA Bistro.

QAGOMA Director Chris Saines, in the media release accompanying the sculpture’s unveiling, described its development as building “on decades of experience collaborating with artists on projects for its Children’s Art Centre.” That attribution is significant. The Big Hose is not merely a piece of public art that happens to be accessible to children. It is explicitly understood by the institution as an extension of the Children’s Art Centre’s mission into the open air — art as play, play as learning, the gallery’s intellectual commitments extended beyond its walls and beyond its opening hours.

The sculpture carries layers of meaning that the Centre’s collaboration model has come to develop as a signature approach. Artist Tony Albert has described the work’s location as the Story Place of Kuril, the native water rat, with the central idea of “creating greater awareness of the thousands of years of Indigenous history of this site, Kurilpa.” Artist Nell has noted the environmental prompt embedded in the work: there is no tap attached to the hose, so the illusion of water is conveyed by the form alone, prompting the young viewer to ask where water comes from. A playful large-scale object becomes, in this framing, a vehicle for First Nations history and ecological thinking — without condescension, without simplification, through the natural curiosity of a child encountering something enormous and strange and designed to be touched.

The Big Hose is fabricated in aluminium, reclaimed hardwood, paint and rubber. It was made possible by private giving through the QAGOMA Foundation and is now part of the permanent collection. Its arrival joins five other artworks by leading Australian and international artists surrounding GOMA — including works by Judy Watson, Michael Parekowhai and Lee Mingwei — completing a precinct that asks of its youngest visitors exactly what the Children’s Art Centre has always asked: that they look, and wonder, and respond.

THE GALLERY AS A DEVELOPMENTAL INSTITUTION.

There is a broader civic argument implicit in everything the Children’s Art Centre does, and it is worth making it explicit. Public investment in a state art gallery is conventionally justified by reference to cultural heritage, tourism, national identity and the intrinsic value of art — arguments addressed elsewhere in this series. The Children’s Art Centre adds a different kind of justification: developmental return.

The early childhood years are when aesthetic sensibility, imaginative capacity and visual thinking are most readily formed. A child who grows up making regular contact with serious contemporary art — who has been physically present in rooms containing major works, who has responded to them through the body as well as the eye, who has heard artists explain their intentions and then made something in response — carries that formation into everything they subsequently do. It is not that art education produces artists. It is that encountering art seriously, from an early age, shapes the quality of attention a person brings to the rest of their experience.

QAGOMA’s Wikipedia entry observes that the Gallery treats “developing youth audiences for visual art” as an explicit institutional priority. The Children’s Art Centre is the primary instrument of that priority. It is not a supplementary program. It is one of the clearest expressions of what QAGOMA believes a public art institution is for.

As Brisbane moves toward the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games — a period in which cultural infrastructure across the city and Queensland more broadly will receive renewed international attention — the Children’s Art Centre represents something that international audiences and institutional partners will find genuinely distinctive: a museum that has embedded, from the beginning, a serious commitment to its youngest public. That commitment is not the product of a particular era’s fashions in museum education. It is structural.

PERMANENCE AND CIVIC IDENTITY.

Institutions that hold to a principle across decades — especially a principle that asks something of them, that costs money and curatorial energy and requires sustained artistic collaboration — demonstrate through that consistency a form of civic integrity that cannot be manufactured through a single policy announcement. The Children’s Art Centre has been part of GOMA since the building opened. It has survived changes in government, changes in institutional leadership, the 2011 flood that closed the Cultural Centre temporarily, and the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has continued to commission artists, to develop new programs, to welcome children from four months of age into genuine encounters with contemporary art.

That continuity is itself an argument. It says that the Queensland Government’s investment in QAGOMA is not merely investment in the prestige of international blockbuster exhibitions or the acquisition of significant works for the State Collection. It is investment in something less glamorous and more durable: the early formation of aesthetic intelligence in Queensland children, generation after generation, in a publicly accessible space at the heart of Brisbane’s cultural precinct.

The permanence of this commitment connects to the broader project of recording Queensland’s civic and cultural institutions with the kind of stability that digital identity infrastructure can now provide. The onchain namespace qagoma.queensland represents exactly this kind of anchoring: a permanent civic address for an institution that has, over more than a century and across two buildings, maintained the argument that art belongs to everyone. The Children’s Art Centre is among the clearest expressions of that argument — an argument made not in documents or mission statements, but in the daily experience of children who enter a serious contemporary art museum and are met there with seriousness in return.

As Queensland builds the permanent digital layer that will carry its civic identity forward through the decades around and beyond 2032, the institutions that anchor that layer matter enormously. QAGOMA, represented through qagoma.queensland, holds among its most significant assets not the value of its collection’s market worth, but the accumulated developmental value of a generation of Queenslanders who grew up knowing that a great art museum considered them its audience from birth. That knowledge, once formed, does not diminish. It compounds.