This year’s NGV Kids Summer Festival program connected visitors to artists, designers and performers from the wider community. From Ancient Greece to ’90s London, the festival invited kids and their families to discover a different NGV exhibition or collection every three days.

The first three days of the Festival were dedicated to showcasing 120 garments and accessories for the Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse exhibition. The project offers insight into McQueen’s far-reaching sources of inspiration, his creative processes and capacity for storytelling. Displayed alongside McQueen’s innovative designs are more than eighty artworks – spanning painting, sculpture, textiles, prints, photography and decorative arts – that help to illuminate the interdisciplinary impulse that defined his career. Drawn from the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – the exhibition reveals common themes and visual reference points that connect his practice with that of artists and designers throughout history. McQueen’s designs were always personal and complex responses to the world around him: he once stated, ‘Fashion is just the medium’.

On Thursday, NGV’s Temple of Boom presented a series of Greek-themed events symbolising unity, freedom and perseverance in the Grollo Equiset garden space at the replica of the Parthenon designed by architects Adam Newman and Kelvin Tsang. The events took place every day from the 17th till the 19th of January and included dance performances, theatre seminars, live storytelling as well as series of educational presentations at the ground floor of the Great Hall gallery.

Most notably, Athens-born artist and author Alkistis Pitsaki transported the audience to the birthplace through prose and myth connecting the past with the present and the future while the dancers from Manasis School of Greek Dance and Culture received a standing ovation for their enthusiastic performances.

Artist Alkisti Pitsaki. Photo: Supplied