Publications
My arts writing includes contributions to exhibition catalogues, museum publications, photographic books and academic texts on museum education.
Collecting: Living With Art
Kym Elphinstone, with Jo Higgins & Dave Wheeler
Thames & Hudson Australia, April 2025
Collecting: Living with Art is a visual feast and tribute to the personal journey of acquiring and curating art, it celebrates the enriching endeavour of bringing art into the home. Artists, curators, architects, designers, gallerists and philanthropists open their doors, offering fascinating insights and practical advice on their distinctive approach to integrating art into daily life.
Conceived and curated by Kym Elphinstone with essays by Jo Higgins and photography by Dave Wheeler, the collectors’ stories demonstrate how art can transform a space and turn it into a sanctuary of self-expression. Featuring a diverse mix of bold abstract works, contemporary photography, sculpture and mid-century masterpieces, Collecting is a powerful testament to the beauty and individuality of creating a home filled with meaning and inspiration.
20th Biennale of Sydney Guide
Various contributing writers
Biennale of Sydney, 2016
The Guide for the 20th Biennale of Sydney: The Future Is Already Here - It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, featured maps, public program information and profiles on each of the exhibiting artists at each of the seven venues across Sydney.
Artist profiles by Jo Higgins include Bharti Kher, Germaine Kruip, Celine Condorelli, Yannick Dauby & Wan-Shuen Tsai, Bo Christian Larsson, Minouk Lim, Jumana Manna, Melik Ohanian, Falke Pisano, Christoph Schlingensief and Alexis Teplin.
21st Century Portaits
Jo Higgins, Sandy Nairne, Sarah Howgate & Andrew Graham Dixon
National Portrait Gallery, London 2013
21st Century Portraits explores new developments in the representation of the human form and face as well as the continuing appeal of commissioned portraiture.
Written by Jo Higgins, with a foreword by Andrew Graham-Dixon and an essay by Sandy Nairne (Former Director of the National Portrait Gallery) and Sarah Howgate (Curator of Contemporary Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery), 21st Century Portraits features more than 150 portraits by 50 international artists.
Organised thematically, the book examines seven key strands of portraiture: Observational Portraits; Self-Portraits; Commissioned and Celebrity Portraits; Social Portraits; Geopolitics and National Identity; The Body; and Re-invented Portraits.
ACADEMIC PUBLISHING & WRITING ON MUSEUM EDUCATION:
Looking at Youth Programs in Art Museums from an International Perspective
ed. Ai Wee Seow, Susan McCollough & Heather Maxson
Routledge
(FORTHCOMING 2026)
Museum Teen Program How-To Kit
ed. Simona Zappas, Nisa Mackie and Dr Yolanda Majors.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2023
Museum Teen Program How-To Kit includes comprehensive essays, activities and reflections that look at complex pedagogies, social justice, group dynamics, teen subcultures and institutional complexities, was born out of a six-month long peer-learning community in 2021 and builds on years of research by the Walker Art Center investigating teen arts programming and pedagogy.
Nisa Mackie, who was then the Walker’s Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs, explained of the publication: “We wanted to create a book that specifically advises how to structure a teen council, navigate the museum-as-institution (and how young people contend with it), and support group facilitation techniques.”
My essay “Heartbreakers and Troublemakers: How to Navigate, Embrace & Ultimately Survive Disruption” can be found on pp.396-410.
A full, free PDF of the book is available via the link below.
You can read more about the PLC and my participation here.
Beyond Community Engagement: Transforming Dialogues in Art, Education and the Cultural Sphere
ed. Kym Snepvangers and Donna Mathewson-Mitchell.
UNSW / Common Ground Publishing, 2018
Beyond Community Engagement features a peer-reviewed chapter co-authored by Jo Higgins and Sarah Coffils, “Collaboration or cooperation: Peer-led learning and institutional partnerships through two case studies.”
The chapter explores, from a practitioner-based perspective, two recent arts projects that employed peer-led and project-based models of learning to engage with audiences of young people aged 13-25.
These projects include the London-based Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project and the Pilot Regional Youth Engagement Project that formed part of Kaldor Public Art Projects’ Project 30 - Marina Abramovic: In Residence.
You can read more about Sarah’s and my chapter, including our abstract, and the approach we took to writing this paper here.