The only Collection of it's type and size in Australia and only one of four such collections in the world, the Cunningham Dax Collection is named after its founder Dr Eric Cunningham Dax (1908 – 2008). The collection contains over 16,000 works which have all been created by people who have a lived experience of mental health issues or psychological trauma
The Collection tells stories about mental health, lived experiences and the value of art. It includes works on paper, canvases, photograph’s, textiles, sculptures, installations, artists’ books and diaries, digital media and films
Dr. Dax was an English psychiatrist who was appointed as the Chairman of the Mental Hygiene Authority in Melbourne in 1952. In this role Dr. Dax made many positive changes to Victoria’s mental health services. One such change was to introduce an art therapy program into Victorian psychiatric hospitals
Victoria’s psychiatric hospitals began to be closed down in the 1980s and the thousands of artworks that had been created in the art therapy programs may have been destroyed. However, Dr. Dax believed that these were very valuable as educative tools. So he salvaged around 8000 of these works, which is how the Cunningham Dax Collection began
Two distinct eras are represented in the Cunningham Dax Collection; artworks produced within psychiatric hospitals from 1940s into 1970s and artworks donated to the Collection by artists and community groups from 1980s until the present
In the early 2000s the Collection expanded to include artworks made by people who have experienced psychological trauma. This expansion led to a number of group donations, including the Childhood Abuse Collection, the Holocaust Collection, the Tsunami Collection, the Safe Havens Asylum Seekers Collection and the Bushfire Collection
