The Blake Prize for Religious Art: The First 25 Years – A Survey.

About the exhibition
Established in 1951 with the aim to renew the relationship between art and the church in Australia, the Blake Prize for Religious Art was an annual award inspired by the European Sacred Art Renewal Movement.  This survey exhibition of the first twenty-five years of The Blake Prize presented mainly each annual exhibition’s prize-winning paintings selected from hundreds of entries. The exhibition made evident certain shifts in the trajectory of the prize, including a move away from the predominance of explicitly religious and Christian iconography in the early years towards a more abstract understanding of implicitly religious expression as time went on. Since 2016 the Blake Prize has been awarded biennially and administered by the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, where it continues to this day.

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
MUMA’s online archive is expanding. We welcome your feedback and input. Please contact muma.communications@monash.edu with any information that could help enrich the archive for future audiences.

^{Image: Exhibition catalogue cover showing Roger Kemp, The Cross 1968, oil on hardboard, 181.5 x 116.5 cm. Monash University Collection, Melbourne}