Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art Art Gallery of South Australia Adelaide 2 March - 22 April 1990 Confined exclusively to Australian art - the Whitney Biennial is a model - the Adelaide Biennials will both complement the international Biennale of Sydney and posit alternatives to the surveys of current art represented by the biennial Australian Perspecta exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The last 10 years has seen a noticeable empowerment of the visual art institutions in Australia. As recently as the late seventies the Sydney Biennale still sometimes happened every three years. In 1980 the Adelaide Festival was as yet innocent of Artist's Week and the Adelaide Biennial.
A festival for schools initiated by the Key Centre for Design at RMIT aims to encourage young people to explore aspects of their human made environment.
Artists' Week was established in 1982 as an initiative of the South Australian visual arts community in reponse to the poor emphasis on visual art in the Adelaide Festival Program and to the growing need for forums to discuss art.