House of the People (2024), Broadway Sydney. Artwork by Kris Andrew Small and Micke Lindebergh. Commissioned and produced by ART AID for Mirvac, delivered under the City of Sydney Creative Hoardings Program.
Two of Australia's boldest contemporary artists. One heritage brief.
213 Broadway, Glebe is not a neutral canvas. The former Grace Bros Model and Moxham Store is a State Heritage-listed Edwardian building with over 120 years of history embedded in its facade. When ART AID was engaged by Mirvac to commission artwork for construction hoardings wrapping three sides of the site, the original brief had a very different flavour. What happened next is a good example of what it actually means to respond to a place.
The artists we selected, Kris Andrew Small and Micke Lindebergh, were chosen for their contemporary practice. Kris works in colour, typography, pattern, and collage, channelling societal ideas through bold and exuberant visuals. Micke brings a confident hand and a playful use of the primary palette, drawing influence from Japanese pop, Scandinavian design, and the Sydney summertime. Their work sits firmly in the present tense, which made the question of how they would respond to a site with this much history an interesting one.
Kris Andrew Small (left) and Micke Lindebergh (right).
The brief that shifted
Partway through the engagement, it became clear that the project required more than a visually strong set of hoardings. The building is listed on the State Heritage Register. The development approval carried obligations around how the site's history was acknowledged and interpreted. The artwork, in other words, needed to do something specific: it needed to engage with what this building actually is and what it represents in the history of Sydney.
That was a genuinely different ask for two artists whose instinct is to work at the edge of contemporary visual culture. The typical response to a heritage brief looks nothing like their practice. So rather than ask them to move towards something generic, we brought the history to them.
Bringing in the consultant
ART AID engaged Urbis, a planning consultancy, to work directly with Kris and Micke on understanding the site. The Conservation Management Plan goes well beyond a standard heritage summary. It is a detailed account of the building's full history: the Grace Brothers who opened their first store in 1885 and arrived at Broadway two years later, the Moxham family who owned the land the extension sits on, the architects Walter Newman, David Thomas Morrow, William Deputron, and James Percy Gordon who shaped it over successive decades, and the layers of alteration the building has accumulated since.
What that document gave the artists was not a set of restrictions. It gave them material. The original terrazzo entrance floors. The distinctive arched windows the store was famous for, described at the time as providing the best light of any shop in Sydney. The illuminated glass globe on the clock tower, originally lit at night. The Art Deco remodelling of 1938. The Grace Bros waratah logo, carried for decades. The names of the people behind the building, written into its history but largely invisible to the people who walk past it every day.
Visual research by the artists, drawing directly from the building's architectural elements and history.
How the artists responded
The artwork is called House of the People, a direct reference to the name Grace Bros gave their flagship Broadway store. It is a title that says something about how the building functioned in its day: open floor plans, free access, a place where you could browse without obligation in an era when shopping still required permission to enter. It was a genuinely radical retail concept for early twentieth century Sydney, and it deserved to be acknowledged by name.
Kris and Micke translated the history into the visual language they know best: bold colour, pattern, and typography at scale. Every motif in the work had a specific source. None of it was decorative for its own sake.
The floral motif throughout the work drew from the Grace Bros waratah logo and the terrazzo floor details of the original building entrance.
The waratah that appeared in the Grace Bros logo for most of the company's existence became the foundation for the dominant floral motif running across all three hoarding sites. It also connected to the terrazzo entrance floor of the original building, whose border shapes and floral detailing the artists traced and reinterpreted in their own palette.
The large arched windows of the Model Store facade, once described as providing the best light in Sydney, became the structural framing device throughout the hoarding design.
The large circular windows on the Broadway and Bay Street facades, which gave the store its reputation for light and openness, became the primary structural device for the composition. The window and door frames from the building's exterior were used to house each modular panel of illustration, giving the hoardings an internal logic that mirrored the building they stood in front of.
The clock tower and illuminated glass globe, a landmark on the Broadway and Bay Street corner since 1904, abstracted into the gradient colour palette of the hoarding panels.
The clock tower and glass globe, originally illuminated at night by arc lamps and one of the most recognised features on the Broadway skyline, was abstracted into the gradient colour treatment across the panels. The shift from deep blue through to pink and lime green was not arbitrary. It was a deliberate reference to the illuminated globe set against a gradient dusk, the building making itself seen after dark in an era before outdoor advertising had a playbook.
The Model Store panel, Bay Street. Built between 1902 and 1904, a name given the graphic weight it has always deserved.
The Moxham panel, Bay Street. Named for the family whose land the 1904 extension was built on, a name that had largely disappeared from the site's public story until now.
The typographic panels named everyone. Grace Bros, with their first store on this site in 1887. The Model Store, built between 1902 and 1904. The Moxham extension of 1904 to 1906, named for the family whose land it was built on. The architects: Walter Newman, who designed the original tower; David Thomas Morrow and William Deputron, who shaped the building through its expansions; James Percy Gordon, who continued that work into the mid-twentieth century. These names are not footnotes. In the hands of Kris and Micke, they became the graphic backbone of the work, displayed at scale across hoarding panels in a typeface treatment that sat comfortably alongside the building's own heritage and the visual culture of today.
The result across three sites
House of the People ran across three sides of the building: Parramatta Road, Bay Street, and Grose Street. Each facade had its own layout, scaled and composed for the particular character of that streetscape. Together they formed a complete circuit, a work you read differently depending on which direction you approached from, but one that told a consistent story from every angle.
The Parramatta Road hoarding installed. The modular design allowed each panel to read independently while contributing to the sequence as a whole.
The work was modular by design. Each panel could be read on its own, but the full sequence was where the intention became clear: this was a building being restored, and the hoardings participated in that restoration by surfacing the history the renovation was working to preserve.
What this project is really about
A project like this only works when the right people are talking to each other. The client, the site, the artist, and the consultant all needed to be part of the same conversation, and the outcome reflected that. Kris and Micke were not handed a set of rules and asked to illustrate them. They were given the full story of the building and trusted to find their own way into it. That is a meaningful distinction.
What came back from that process was not a compromise between their practice and the heritage requirements. It was a genuine response to both, because the two were never treated as being in tension. The history of 213 Broadway gave the artists something real to work with, and their visual language gave that history a way to reach people who would otherwise have walked past it without a second glance.
That is the work ART AID does on a project like this: building the conditions for that kind of response, connecting the people who need to be connected, and making sure the brief is something the artist can genuinely engage with rather than just fulfil.
House of the People installed on Grose Street, 213 Broadway, Glebe. Artwork by Kris Andrew Small and Micke Lindebergh, commissioned by ART AID for Mirvac under the City of Sydney Creative Hoardings Program.
With thanks to Kris Andrew Small and Micke Lindebergh for their commitment to the research process and the quality of the outcome, to Mirvac for trusting the site to this approach, to Urbis and GBA Heritage for the heritage consultancy work that made this possible, and to the City of Sydney for the Creative Hoardings Program that gave this building's history a reason to be told.
ART AID is a public art and cultural consultancy working at the intersection of art, community, and place. To find out more about our work visit art-aid.co or follow @artaidau.
