Past exhibitions

The 'snail mail' sent to the City of Melbourne since the 1840s now gives a suprising lesson in graphic design and city history.

'From Public Figures to Public Sculpture' considers the changing role of figurative and non-figurative sculptures in our streets and parks.

Through photography and text, A New Jerusalem asks us to pause and contemplate the meaning of worship and faith today.

Curator Louis Porter trawls through the city’s collection of 1960s photographs from the Engineering Branch. The artistic result is surprisingly human and contemporary.

Artworks, photographs, objects and ephemera from the Royal Historical Society of Victoria collection illustrate a centenary of bygone life in Victoria.

Louise Forthun’s stencil-cut elevated perspective paintings frame Robyn Annear’s historical reflections on our changing city skyline.

Moomba? Rude word or not, that is the central semantic conundrum of this show, backed by gilded treasures of parades past.

Fascinating historical photographs and work of eight contemporary artists together form a meditation on nature’s place in urban environments.

Charles Pickett scrutinises the power of press photographers to create and shape a modern sporting phenomenon, the 1956 Olympics, in the pre-TV era.

Curator and jeweller Marcos Davidson pays homage to the rich symbolism of Melbourne’s coat of arms, the marker of its authenticity and authority.

A perfect precursor to the era of WikiLeaks, '(mis)Information Bureau' inhabits the murky space between fact and fiction.

Photographs, objects and ephemera illuminate the marriage of two municipalities and an historic moment in North Melbourne’s past.

From mayoral robes to fashion on the field, the Museum of Modern Oddities plundered the city’s collection, finding some threads better left unfound.

Plotted here is the genealogy of planning interventions that have shaped the complex urban centre of Melbourne since 1837.

Remarkable hand-coloured photographs illustrate the horticultural and design genius once visited upon grand civic events in Melbourne.

The margin notes, sketches and doodles of six contemporary visual researchers comment on the city’s Art and Heritage Collection.

Featuring striking photographs by the likes of Laurie Richards and Mark Strizic, this exhibition records a decade of radical spatial and cultural change.

Artists, researchers and individuals operate in concert to envision sustainable futures for local communities.

Through beautiful and yet ironic sculptural works, artist Tim Horn reveals some of the semantic reclamations of the gay community.

'Crepuscular: the wild animals of Melbourne' captured the moment as twilight softens the city’s hard edges.

Guru of all things collectable, Adrian Franklin reflects on the City’s diplomatic spoils and the symbolic power of gift exchange.

Pedestrian needs, indeed! Michael Trudgeon examines how the desires of the urban flaneur have shaped our city through design for public spaces.

Australia’s commercial artists have long been wording-up the public. Post No Bills investigates the art of persuasion that once coloured the city's streets.

Indigenous showpeople of 1950s’ Melbourne are remembered in Virginia Fraser and Destiny Deacon’s look at a forgotten era of performing arts history.

Parking officers are given a voice in this amusing and enlightening window where banality and blind fury co-exist unhappily.

The perceptive eye of photographer Ricky Maynard reveals indigenous stories and absences written into our city’s landscape.

Part performance, part exhibition, 'Mostlandian Embassy' parodies the evermore bureaucratised and alienating world in which we live.

From the filthy streets of Marvellous Melbourne to the grungy side of our ‘most liveable city’, Melbourne’s dirty linen is hung out to air.

Contemporary artists and historian Andrew May engage with that most convenient of public conveniences.

Curator and historian Andrew May draws on pictorial, literary and archival sources to evoke Melbourne’s plucky little envoys of the press.

Part of Midsumma, Graham Willett tells the history of camping it up on the streets and the beats of 1950s’ Melbourne.

Through evocative photographs and curious artefacts, the centrality of breweries in the Melbourne story is as clear as the amber liquid itself.

Indigenous artists Destiny Deacon, Fiona Foley, Julie Gough and Diane Jones provide a ‘blak’ response to the city’s Art and Heritage Collection.

Extraordinary images from the City’s Art and Heritage Collection illustrate a history of devastation that has been part of the Melbourne story.

The rare and the curious from the city’s Art and Heritage Collection are brought together in this glimpse into civic culture.