Contemporary Indigenous Australian art facts for kids
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art is amazing modern artwork made by Indigenous Australians, which includes both Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander people. This art movement really took off in 1971. It started with a special painting movement in a place called Papunya, near Alice Springs. Artists like Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Kaapa Tjampitjinpa were part of this, helped by a teacher named Geoffrey Bardon.
This new art style quickly became popular across rural and remote Aboriginal communities. At the same time, different kinds of Indigenous art also started appearing in cities. Together, these styles have become a huge part of Australian art. Many Indigenous art centres have helped this modern art movement grow. By 2010, it was thought that over 5,000 artists were involved, mostly in northern and western Australia.
Many contemporary Indigenous artists have won major art awards in Australia. For example, Indigenous artists have won the Wynne Prize at least three times. Shirley Purdie won the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 2007. John Mawurndjul won the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award in 2003, and Judy Watson won it in 2006. There's even a special national art prize just for Indigenous artists, called the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award. In 2013, Jenni Kemarre Martiniello from Canberra won this award.
Indigenous artists, like Rover Thomas, have shown their work at the Venice Biennale in Italy in 1990 and 1997. In 2007, a painting called Earth's Creation by Emily Kngwarreye was the first Indigenous Australian artwork to sell for more than one million Australian dollars. Many leading Indigenous artists have had their own exhibitions in Australia and around the world. Their art has also been part of big projects, like the design of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. All of Australia's main public art galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, have works by contemporary Indigenous artists. In 2010, the National Gallery of Australia even opened a new section just for its Indigenous art collection.
The well-known "dot painting" style, which uses many small dots to create images, is a famous type of contemporary Aboriginal art. It is often created by artists from the Western Desert.
Contents
Art's Long History and How It Grew
Indigenous Australian art has a very long history, possibly "the world’s longest continuing art tradition." Before Europeans arrived in Australia, Indigenous people created art in many ways. This included sculpture, wood carving, rock carving, body painting, bark painting, and weaving. Many of these art forms are still used today, both for traditional purposes and for creating art to sell. Some older techniques, like body scarring and making possum-skin cloaks, have become less common. However, Indigenous Australians also started using new techniques, like painting on paper and canvas. Early examples include drawings from the late 1800s by William Barak.
Early Steps in Modern Art
In the 1930s, artists Rex Battarbee and John Gardner taught watercolour painting to Albert Namatjira. He was an Indigenous man from the Hermannsberg Mission in the Northern Territory. His landscape paintings, first made in 1936 and shown in Australian cities in 1938, were an instant hit. He became the first Indigenous Australian watercolour artist and the first to successfully show and sell his art to non-Indigenous people. Other Indigenous artists in the region, especially his male relatives, adopted Namatjira's style. They became known as the Hermannsburg School or the Arrernte Watercolourists.
Namatjira passed away in 1959. By then, another art initiative had started in Ernabella, now called Pukatja, South Australia. There, bright acrylic paints were used to make designs for posters and postcards. This later led to fabric design and batik work, which is still made at Australia's oldest Indigenous art centre.
How Modern Indigenous Art Began
While the art projects at Hermannsburg and Ernabella were important, most people say that modern Indigenous art, especially acrylic painting, truly began in Papunya, Northern Territory, in 1971. A school teacher named Geoffrey Bardon arrived in Papunya. He started an art program with the children and then with the men of the community. The men first painted a mural on the school walls. Then they started painting on boards and canvas. Around the same time, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, an artist from the community who worked with Bardon, won an art award in Alice Springs for his painting Gulgardi.
Soon, more than 20 men in Papunya were painting. They created their own company, Papunya Tula Artists Limited, to help make and sell their artworks. Although painting quickly became popular in Papunya, it stayed a "small-scale regional phenomenon" throughout the 1970s. For ten years, none of the state galleries or the national gallery collected these works. The only exception was the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, which bought 220 of the early Papunya paintings.
How It Grew and Changed
After being mostly in Papunya in the 1970s, the painting movement grew quickly in the 1980s. It spread to places like Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Utopia, and Haasts Bluff in the Northern Territory, and Balgo, Western Australia. By the 1990s, art was being created in many communities across northern Australia. This included new communities like Kintore, Northern Territory and Kiwirrkurra Community, Western Australia.
As the movement grew, not all artists were happy with how things were going. What started as a modern way to share traditional knowledge and identity was becoming more about making money. The success of the art created its own pressures within communities. Some artists criticized the art centre workers and stopped painting, focusing instead on traditional rituals. Other artists were making works that were less connected to the traditional ways of sharing designs. However, the growth of the movement did not slow down. At least ten more painting communities started in central Australia between the late 1990s and 2006.
Indigenous art cooperatives have been very important for the rise of contemporary Indigenous art. Many Western artists go to art school and work alone. But most contemporary Indigenous art is created in community groups and art centres. In 2010, Desart, the main group for central Australian Indigenous art centres, had 44 member centres. ANKAAA, the main group for northern Australian communities, had 43 member centres. These centres support many artists. ANKAAA estimated that in 2010, its member organizations included up to 5,000 artists. The large number of people involved, and the small size of the places where they work, means that sometimes a quarter to half of community members are artists. Art critic Sasha Grishin said these communities have "the highest per capita concentrations of artists anywhere in the world."
Art Styles and What They Mean
Indigenous art often shows the spiritual traditions, cultural practices, and social situations of Indigenous people. These things are different across Australia, so the artworks vary greatly from place to place. Books about Australian Indigenous art often group works by geographical region. The usual groups are art from the Central Australian desert; the Kimberley in Western Australia; the northern parts of the Northern Territory, especially Arnhem Land (often called the Top End); and northern Queensland, including the Torres Strait Islands. Art made in cities is also usually seen as a separate style of Indigenous art, even though it's not tied to one specific place.
Desert Art
Indigenous artists from remote central Australia, especially the central and western desert area, often paint specific 'dreamings' or stories. These stories are ones for which they have personal responsibility or rights. The works of the Papunya Tula painters and Utopia artist Emily Kngwarreye are among the most famous. The patterns painted by central Australian artists, like those from Papunya, came from traditional designs drawn in sand, on boards, or carved into rock. The symbols in the designs can represent places, movement, or people and animals. Dot patterns can show things like sparks, clouds, or rain.
Some artists from central Australia, like those from Balgo, Western Australia, also use more realistic, figurative styles. Some central Australian artists whose people were forced to leave their lands in the mid-1900s due to nuclear weapon tests have created art that uses traditional painting techniques but also shows the effects of the blasts on their land.
APY Lands Art
The Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, in remote north-western South Australia, are famous for their artists. These artists are always well-represented in exhibitions and awards for Indigenous Australian artists. In 2017, APY artists received 25 nominations for the important Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. Two were finalists for the Archibald Prize. In 2019, 14 APY artists' works were shortlisted for the $50,000 Wynne Prize for landscape painting. Also in 2019, APY artists won or were shortlisted for the Ramsay Art Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the John Fries Award, and others. Nici Cumpston, the artistic director of the Tarnanthi Festival at the Art Gallery of South Australia, often visits the APY art centres.
The APY Art Centre Collective is a group of ten Indigenous-owned and -run businesses. It supports artists from across the Lands and helps sell their work. The collective helps with group projects, like the famous Kulata Tjuta project and the APY Photography initiative. Seven art centres across the Lands support the work of more than 500 Anangu artists. These range from the oldest, Ernabella Arts, to Iwantja Arts at Indulkana, where award-winning Vincent Namatjira lives. Other APY centres include Tjala Arts (at Amata), Kaltjiti Arts, Mimili Maku Arts, and Tjungu Palya (Nyapari). Along with the APY centres, Maruku Arts from Uluru, Tjanpi Desert Weavers based in Alice Springs, and Ara Iritja Aboriginal Corporation bring the total to ten.
The Collective has galleries in Darlinghurst, Sydney, and since May 2019, a gallery and studio space in Light Square (Wauwi) in Adelaide.
Art from the Top End
In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, men have painted their traditional clan designs. The symbols and meanings are quite different from those in central Australia. In north Queensland and the Torres Strait, many communities continue their cultural art traditions. They also use their art to share strong political and social messages.
Art from the Cities
In Indigenous communities across northern Australia, most artists don't have formal training. Their work is based on traditional knowledge and skills. In southeast Australia, other Indigenous artists, often living in cities, have studied at art schools and universities. These artists are often called "urban" Indigenous artists. However, this term can sometimes be debated, and it doesn't always describe where these artists came from. For example, Bronwyn Bancroft grew up in a town, Michael Riley came from rural New South Wales, and Lin Onus spent time on his father's traditional land. Some, like Onus, taught themselves, while others, like artist Danie Mellor or artist and curator Brenda Croft, finished university studies in fine arts.
Art Materials and Techniques
Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas noted that contemporary Indigenous art was special because "wholly new media were adapted so rapidly to produce work of such palpable strength." Much of this art is made using acrylic paint on canvas. However, other materials and techniques are also used, often in specific regions. Bark painting is very common among artists from Arnhem Land, who also do carving and weaving. In central Australian communities linked to the Pitjantjatjara people, pokerwork carving is important. In 2011, the National Gallery's senior curator of prints and drawings said that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander printmaking was "the most significant development in recent printmaking history."
Making textiles, including batik, has been important in the northwestern desert regions of South Australia, in the Northern Territory's Utopia community, and other parts of central Australia. For ten years before she became famous for painting, Emily Kngwarreye was creating batik designs. These designs showed her "amazing original talent" and her modern artistic ideas. A wide range of textile art techniques, like dyeing and weaving, are especially linked to Pukatja, South Australia (formerly Ernabella). In the mid-2000s, this community also became known for its beautiful sgraffito ceramics. Hermannsburg, where Albert Namatjira and the Arrente Watercolourists came from, is now famous for its pottery.
Among Indigenous artists in cities, more diverse techniques are used. These include silkscreen printing, poster making, photography, television, and film. One of the most important contemporary Indigenous artists of his time, Michael Riley, worked with film, video, still photography, and digital media. Similarly, Bronwyn Bancroft has worked with fabric, textiles, "jewellery design, painting, collage, illustration, sculpture and interior decoration." Still, painting remains a popular medium for many 'urban' artists, such as Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley, Trevor Nickolls, Lin Onus, Judy Watson, and Harry Wedge.
Art Shows and Exhibitions
At first, public recognition and exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art were very limited. For example, it was only a small part of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) collection when its building opened in 1982. Early major art shows were held as part of the Sydney Biennales in 1979 and 1982. A large sand painting was a special feature of the 1981 Sydney Festival. Early private gallery shows of contemporary Indigenous art included a solo exhibition of bark paintings by Johnny Bulunbulun in Sydney in 1981. There was also an exhibition of western desert artists in Sydney in 1982, as part of the Sydney Festival.
There are now several regular exhibitions just for contemporary Indigenous art. Since 1984, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award exhibition has been held in the Northern Territory. It is run by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. In 2007, the NGA held the first National Indigenous Art Triennial (NIAT). This show included works by thirty contemporary Indigenous artists like Richard Bell, Danie Mellor, Doreen Reid Nakamarra, and Shane Pickett. Even though it's called a "Triennial" (meaning every three years), the second one wasn't held until 2012. The third Triennial, called Defying Empire, was held in 2017. Its title referred to the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum.
The Araluen Centre for Arts and Entertainment, a public art gallery in Alice Springs, hosts the yearly Desert Mob exhibition. This show displays current paintings from Aboriginal art centres across Australia.
Several individual artists have had special exhibitions that look back at their whole career. These have included Rover Thomas at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994, Emily Kngwarreye at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1998, John Mawurndjul at the Tinguely Museum in Switzerland in 2005, and Paddy Bedford at several galleries, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2006–07.
Internationally, Indigenous artists have represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. These include Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls in 1990, and Emily Kngwarreye, Judy Watson, and Yvonne Koolmatrie in 1997. In 2000, several artists and art groups showed their work in the famous Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia. In 2003, eight Indigenous artists – Paddy Bedford, John Mawurndjul, Ningura Napurrula, Lena Nyadbi, Michael Riley, Judy Watson, Tommy Watson, and Gulumbu Yunupingu – worked together on a project. They created artworks to decorate one of the four buildings of the Musée du quai Branly, which was finished in 2006.
In 2005, a project called Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future involved Indigenous artists Daisy Jugadai Napaltjarri and Molly Jugadai Napaltjarri. This project combined art and archaeology.
In London, the Tate Modern's exhibition, A Year in Art: Australia 1992, opened in June 2021 and was so popular it was extended until September 2022. In mid-2022, the National Gallery Singapore opened a big exhibition called Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia. This was the largest show of its kind to tour Asia.
Art Collections Around the World
Contemporary Indigenous artworks are collected by all of Australia's main public galleries. The National Gallery of Australia has a very important collection. A new section was opened in 2010 for its permanent exhibition. Some state galleries, like the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, have special gallery spaces always showing contemporary Indigenous art. The National Gallery of Victoria's collection includes the country's main collection of Indigenous batik. The Araluen Centre for Arts and Entertainment has the largest collection of works by Albert Namatjira.
Galleries outside Australia that collect contemporary Indigenous art include the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can find permanent displays of Indigenous art outside Australia at the Seattle Art Museum, Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art, and the Kluge–Ruhe Museum at the University of Virginia.
Art Prizes and Awards
Contemporary Indigenous artworks have won many of Australia's top national art prizes. These include the Wynne Prize, the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, and the Blake Prize for Religious Art. Indigenous winners include Shirley Purdie, who won the Blake Prize in 2007 with her work Stations of the Cross. John Mawurndjul won the Clemenger Award in 2003, and Judy Watson won it in 2006. The Wynne Prize has been won by contemporary Indigenous artists several times. Gloria Petyarre won in 1999 with Leaves, George Tjungurrayi in 2004, and Joanne Currie Nalingu in 2008 with her painting The river is calm.
Besides winning major prizes, Indigenous artists have often been finalists in these competitions. The Blake Prize has included many Indigenous finalists, such as Bronwyn Bancroft (2008) and Linda Syddick Napaltjarri (three times).
Australia's most important Indigenous art prize is the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Started by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in 1984, the main winner receives A$40,000. There are also five category awards, each worth $4,000: one for bark painting, one for works on paper, one for three-dimensional works, and, new in 2010, one for new media. Winners of the main prize include Makinti Napanangka in 2008 and Danie Mellor in 2009. In 2008, the Art Gallery of Western Australia started the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards. This award includes the country's most valuable Indigenous art cash prize of A$50,000, plus a A$10,000 prize for the top Western Australian artist, and a A$5,000 People's Choice Award. All are chosen from the finalists, which include 15 individual artists and one group. The 2009 winner of the main prize was Ricardo Idagi, while the People's Choice award went to Shane Pickett. Wayne Quilliam was named the 2009 NAIDOC Artist of the Year for his many years of work with Indigenous groups around the world.
Benefits and Challenges
The growth of Indigenous art has brought many good things to Indigenous Australians. This includes economic, social, and cultural benefits. Selling artworks is a big economic activity for individual artists and their communities. Estimates of how much the art sector is worth vary. In the early 2000s, it was valued at A$100 to 300 million. By 2007, it was half a billion dollars and still growing. This sector is especially important for many Indigenous communities. Besides providing money for a group that often faces economic challenges, it also strengthens Indigenous identity and traditions. It has helped keep communities together. For example, early paintings made in Papunya were created by older Aboriginal men to help teach younger generations about their culture and responsibilities.
However, cheating and unfair treatment are big problems in contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Indigenous artworks have often been copied without the artists' permission. For example, the Reserve Bank of Australia used a David Malangi painting on the one-dollar note in 1966 without permission. Similar copying has happened with fabric designs, T-shirts, and carpets. There have been claims of artists being taken against their families' wishes by people who wanted their paintings.
Artists, especially in remote parts of Australia, sometimes paint for people other than the Indigenous art centres or their own companies. They do this to earn money. However, the quality of these paintings can be uneven, and their economic value can be uncertain. Doubts about where Indigenous paintings came from, and about the prices paid for them, have led to media attention and a government inquiry. These doubts have also limited how much the value of the artworks can grow. Questions about whether works are real have come up for certain artists, including Emily Kngwarreye and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. In 2001, an art dealer was jailed for cheating related to Clifford Possum's work. These problems led to a commercial code of conduct being introduced in 2009. This code was meant to set "minimum standards of practice and fair dealing in the Indigenous visual arts industry." However, ongoing problems in the industry led the head of the code's body, Ron Merkel, to ask for the code to be made compulsory for art dealers in September 2012.
Prices for Indigenous artworks sold in the secondary market (like auctions) vary a lot. Until 2007, the record at auction for an Indigenous artwork was $778,750. This was paid in 2003 for a Rover Thomas painting, All That Big Rain Coming from the Top Side. In 2007, a major work by Emily Kngwarreye, Earth's Creation, sold for $1.056 million. This was a new record, but it was broken just a few months later when Clifford Possum's huge work Warlugulong was bought for $2.4 million by the National Gallery of Australia. At the same time, however, works by famous artists but with uncertain origins were not selling at auctions. In 2003, there were 97 Indigenous Australian artists whose works were selling at auction in Australia for over $5,000. The total auction market was worth around $9.5 million. That year, Sotheby's estimated that half of the sales were to buyers outside Australia. By 2012, the market had changed, with older works selling for higher prices than contemporary paintings.
A change in Australian superannuation (retirement fund) investment rules in 2011 caused a sharp drop in sales of new Indigenous art. The change says that assets bought for a self-managed superannuation fund cannot be "used" before retirement. This means an artwork must be kept in storage rather than displayed.
Art's Impact on Other Artists
At first, Indigenous art was seen more as something interesting for studies of cultures, rather than an art movement. It had little influence on European Australian artists. The early works of Margaret Preston sometimes used designs from traditional Indigenous art. Her later works showed a deeper influence, "in the use of colours, in the interplay of figuration and abstraction in the formal structure." In contrast, Hans Heysen, even though he admired fellow landscape artist Albert Namatjira and collected his paintings, was not influenced by him. The contemporary Indigenous art movement has influenced some non-Indigenous Australian artists through group projects. Indigenous artists Gordon Bennett and Michael Nelson Jagamarra have worked together on artworks and exhibitions with gallerist Michael Eather and painter Imants Tillers.
What Experts Think of the Art
Professor of art history Ian McLean called the start of the contemporary Indigenous art movement in 1971 "the most fabulous moment in Australian art history." He believed it was becoming one of Australia's founding stories. Art historian Wally Caruana called Indigenous art "the last great tradition of art to be appreciated by the world at large." Contemporary Indigenous art is the only art movement of international importance to come from Australia. Famous critic Robert Hughes saw it as "the last great art movement of the 20th century." Poet Les Murray thought of it as "Australia's equivalent of jazz." Paintings by artists from the western desert, in particular, quickly gained "an extraordinarily widespread reputation," with collectors competing to buy them. Some Indigenous artists are seen as among Australia's best creative talents. Emily Kngwarreye has been called "one of the greatest modern Australian painters," and "among the best Australian artists, arguably amongst the best of her time." Critics reviewing the Hermitage Museum exhibition in 2000 praised it highly. One remarked: "This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cased in the mentality, technology and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage."
Not all opinions have been positive. When an exhibition was held in the United Kingdom in 1993, a reviewer in The Independent described the works as "perhaps the most boring art in the world." Museum curator Philip Batty, who helped create and sell art in central Australia, worried about how the non-Indigenous art market affected the artists, especially Emily Kngwarreye, and their work. He wrote that "there was always a danger that the European component of this cross-cultural partnership would become overly dominant. By the end of her brief career, I think that Emily had all but evacuated this intercultural domain, and her work simply became a mirror image of European desires." Excellent artworks are mixed with less good ones, and only time will tell which ones are truly great.
Art's Comeback in the 2020s
There's been a clear sign of renewed interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous art in the early 2020s, both in Australia and overseas. At the Fremantle Arts Centre's 2022 Revealed exhibition, which showed works by new artists, three-quarters of the artworks sold on the first night. In London, England, the Tate Modern's exhibition, A Year in Art: Australia 1992, opened in June 2021 and was so popular it was extended until September 2022. In mid-2022, Sotheby's in New York moved its yearly Australian Indigenous art sale from the quiet winter season to the busy May "marquee month." The highest-selling work went for just over one million Australian dollars. Also in mid-2022, the National Gallery Singapore opened a major exhibition, Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia, which is the largest show of its kind to tour Asia.
See also
- APY Art Centre Collective
- Indigenous Australian art
- List of Indigenous Australian art movements and cooperatives
- Torres Strait Islander art
|
