Arts & Culture in Geelong: Gallery, Waterfront & Venues

Geelong's arts and culture landscape has been transformed by the city's urban renewal, with the waterfront precinct providing a new arts and cultural focus that complements the outstanding Geelong Art Gallery (one of the finest regional art galleries in Australia) and the Geelong Performing Arts Centre. The city's arts scene benefits from its proximity to Melbourne while developing its own distinctive regional creative identity, and the concentration of creative industries, design studios, and arts organisations in the CBD and the waterfront precinct is creating a genuine arts city out of what was previously known primarily as a manufacturing and AFL town.

Geelong Art Gallery — the Geelong Art Gallery (Little Malop Street, CBD) is one of the finest regional art galleries in Australia, with a collection of over 6,000 works including significant Australian colonial art, the Eugene von Guerard landscape collection (one of Australia's most significant colonial landscape collections), and an excellent contemporary Australian art holding. The gallery's 2022 expansion (the new wing doubling the gallery's footprint) significantly increased exhibition capacity. Entry is free.

Geelong Performing Arts Centre (GPAC) — the GPAC (National Wool Museum precinct) is the major performing arts venue in the Geelong region, hosting the Geelong Symphony Orchestra, Geelong Theatre Company, and major national touring productions. The GPAC presents one of the most diverse performing arts programs in regional Victoria and is a significant anchor of the Geelong CBD arts precinct.

National Wool Museum — the heritage bluestone woolstore building (adjacent to the GPAC) houses the National Wool Museum, which tells the story of Australia's wool industry through outstanding interpretive exhibitions and the largest collection of historic wool processing machinery in Australia. The building itself (1872) is one of Geelong's finest heritage structures.

Geelong waterfront arts precinct — the Geelong waterfront's transformation has included significant new arts and creative industry investment, with the carousel (the restored 1892 Art Deco merry-go-round), the Cunningham Pier heritage precinct, and the string of foreshore sculptures (one of the finest public sculpture collections of any Australian regional city) creating an outdoor arts experience that is genuinely distinctive.

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