• Expansion Project

Expansion Project

Locally Grounded. Nationally Engaged. Globally Minded.

Newcastle Art Gallery has been at the heart of our city’s rich arts and cultural history for over forty years. Our expansion project will deliver an additional 1,600 square meters of exhibition space - more than doubling the space to showcase our city's collection and our artists’ most groundbreaking ideas.

The project will also deliver a new café and retail shop, multi-purpose and educational program spaces, a secure international standard loading dock, and will extend the building's footprint east along Darby Street and Queen Street.

As a major cultural asset for NSW, Newcastle Art Gallery offers the ability to both tell local stories and inspire new ones through the creation, collection and display of works of art that hold local, national and international importance.

While Newcastle Art Gallery is being reimagined, we will continue to deliver ambitious offsite and digital programming for the community.

For the latest information on the Newcastle Art Gallery Expansion, visit our project page here.

Together we can reimagine our Gallery

Community contributions to the Newcastle Art Gallery expansion are welcomed and are tax deductible. Newcastle Art Gallery Foundation has launched a public fundraising campaign to further support and enrich the Gallery expansion over the coming years. To make a donation towards the expansion of the Gallery, please visit the Foundation website here.

To discuss corporate sponsorship or partnership opportunities, please contact the Galley team at artgallery@ncc.nsw.gov.au


How is this project being delivered?

The expansion project is supported by $5 million from the Australian Government under the Regional Recovery Partnerships program and $5 million from the New South Wales Government, as well as $12 million from the Newcastle Art Gallery Foundation made possible through the Valerie and John Ryan bequest, Margaret Olley Trust, and community fundraising over many years. A further $1 million is being sought through the Foundation's public fundraising campaign.

Newcastle Art Gallery Foundation is an independent not-for-profit organisation. Thanks to the generosity of donors, they are close to reaching their goal of $13 million. Be part of the story. Join these donors by making your tax-deductible gift for the Gallery Expansion today nagfoundation.org.au

Before any work could begin, we first needed to pack up over 7,000 works of art. Learn more about the care and planning required to pack up and safely store our world-class collection.

This site itself also required a lot of work before construction could commence. Site preparation works, including remediation of historic mine tunnels 80 metres below the building, were completed to ensure the safety of the site ahead of the main expansion works. Newcastle's long coal mining heritage means that much of the city centre sits on top of a number of historical underground mine workings, which date back as far as the early 1800s.

Around 13,500 cubic metres of grout, which is equivalent to five-and-a-half Olympic-size swimming pools, was successfully placed in the Dudley and Borehole seams running underneath the site as part of the project's Grouting and Verification Plan approved by Subsidence Advisory New South Wales. The remediation work was made possible with the support of the Newcastle Mines Grouting Fund, administered by the Hunter and Central Coast Development Corporation.

Work also included investigation of the existing building's structure and services, relocation of some underground utilities, and heritage investigations to record the history of the site. In late 2023 you may have noticed archaeologists at work uncovering and documenting the history of the site which included homes, a hotel and a cordial factory. Find out more about the history of the site.

For the latest information on the Newcastle Art Gallery Expansion, visit our project page. 

For the latest information on construction works zones and site activities, visit our works updates.
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