Creative Open | A four-day winter arts and music festival

Creative Open, a four-day winter arts and music festival, returns to Sydney’s Northern Beaches with more than eighty events held at multiple venues across the peninsula from 25 to 28 July – featuring live music, comedy, contemporary art, interactive workshops, markets, and more.

Art lovers can go behind the scenes at galleries and studios, to witness the creative process unfold and learn new skills through a range of events and workshops, including printmaking, painting, sculpting, woodturning, photography, jewellery making, glass blowing, and creative writing. Also, explore a range of art exhibitions, including Katy B Plummer: We Believe You Babcia and Three Echos – Western Desert Art at Manly Art Gallery & Museum (MAG&M).

Katy B Plummer, We Believe You Babcia, 2024. Production still by Kuba Dorabialski. Courtesy the artist and Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Sydney

We Believe You Babcia is a multimedia art installation about Polish grandmothers, intergenerational relationships and the often untraced creative lineage of familial storytelling. The work is based on a ghost story told to Plummer’s children by their grandmother. Curated by celebrated curator, writer, artist and activist, Djon Mundine OAM FAHA, Three Echoes – Western Desert Art showcases work by fifty-seven artists from Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff), Papunya and Utopia Aboriginal communities in the western desert regions of the Northern Territory. Both exhibitions can be viewed during the day or after hours at MAG&M’s Happy Hour – featuring live music by Kristina Wilson and Ethan Saunders, and Iwona’s Eyes, episodic performance art by Kuba & Szymon Dorabialski in which two sons perform increasingly desperate and frantic acts of acrobatics for the attention of their mother.

Visit Manly Library to share your own music or poetry at Open Mic Night, Friday 26 July, 5.30–7pm. Revisit on Saturday 27, 11am–3pm, for a special Zine Fair.

northernbeaches.nsw.gov.au/things-do

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