Leon Paroissien, 1937–2024
By Annette Meier
LEON PAROISSIEN in 1985. Courtesy the University of Sydney Archives.
On November 5, Leon Francis Paroissien, the founding director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and a potent force in the country’s cultural landscape, passed away after a long illness. He was 87 years old.
Born in 1937 in Gisborne, Victoria, Paroissien began his professional path into education with a teaching scholarship. After earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Melbourne, he went on to teach art history at the Melbourne Teachers College, then became a senior lecturer at the Tasmanian School of Art in Hobart.
In 1974, Paroissien was appointed the inaugural director of Creative Australia (formerly the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council), the country’s official arts funding and advisory body. At the beginning of his six-year tenure, he negotiated seed money for the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ), a professional body for the region’s art historians, art writers, curators, and artists.
Following his departure from the Board, Paroissien directed the 5th Biennale of Sydney in 1984. Titled “Private Symbol: Social Metaphor,” the Biennale showcased artists whose “personal artistic language [expressed] an interaction” as well as “critiques of contemporary society and its dominant cultures,” as he put it.
That same year, Paroissien and his partner Bernice Murphy became co-curators of the JW Power Collection at the University of Sydney, which was originally established through a bequest from the late Australian artist John Joseph Wardell Power. Shortly after their appointment, they organized an exhibition of Aboriginal art from Ramingining in the Northern Territory, which was subsequently purchased for the Power Collection.
As funds for the Power Collection were running dry, leaving most of the artworks in storage, Paroissien and Murphy negotiated with then-New South Wales premier Neville Wran to relocate everything off-campus, to the old Maritime Services Building at Circular Quay. In 1989, plans to renovate the harborside building were announced and two years later it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), with Paroissien as its founding director. The MCA was the first major public institution dedicated to collecting and exhibiting contemporary visual arts in Australia, or as he described it, “a facility of national cultural significance.”
After leaving the MCA in 1998, Paroissien served as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. Around the same time, he chaired the public art advisory committee for the Sydney Olympic Games.
Aside from his administrative and curatorial roles, Paroissien was also a writer and an editor of many publications, including the biennial art journal Art and Australia from 1987 to 1992, as well as the annual Australian Art Review in 1982 and 1983. He was also involved with ArtAsiaPacific in its early years (then known as ART and AsiaPacific), writing for the first issue in 1993.
A cultural visionary, Paroissien transformed Australia’s contemporary art scene, inspiring later generations of curators and arts administrators.
Annette Meier is an editorial assistant at ArtAsiaPacific.
