Hear all the latest Indigenous art news from the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award in Darwin and the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair when Susan and Emily report back at the Monash Gallery of Art in the final lecture of their 4-part series.
They will provide an insight into the industry that supports and surrounds contemporary Aboriginal art, from art centres to commercial dealers.
Each month features a different region, community or style of Aboriginal art, with extracts from Contemporary Aboriginal Art and a monthly planner. Spiral bound for ease of use, the diary is a week to an opening with a full page image per week. A total of 52 glorious images celebrate the vibrancy, range and quality of this unique art.
Featured for 2011 is the art of: Papunya/Kintore: Utopia: Yuendumu: APY/NPY Lands: Classic Kimberley: Balgo: Yirrkala: Central Arnhem Land Tiwi Islands: Art in the three dimensional : Queensland & TSI: Into the New.
To be launched on Thursday September 9 2010 at 4.30 pm at
This four-part course, presented by renowned writers and publishers Susan McCulloch & Emily McCulloch Childs, will provide an in-depth and insightful introduction to contemporary Aboriginal art for the beginner, enthusiast and collector. This course is being held in conjunction with the exhibition Living deadly: haunted surfaces in contemporary art.
Each lecture focuses on a distinct aspect of Indigenous art and over the course of the program you will develop a keen understanding of the vast and diverse field that is contemporary Aboriginal art.
Places are limited
Bookings essential 03 8544 0500
Full series subscription*
$135 General public
$115 Friends of MGA
Single sessions
$35 General public
$30 Friends of MGA
*Subscribe to the FULL SERIES and receive a complimentary copy of the best-selling book McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: the complete guide. The guide is also available to purchase for $49.95rrp from shop@mga, Friends of MGA receive 10% discount in the shop.
Susan is off to Tasmania to present her choices at the opening of the Critic’s Choice exhibition at Hobart’s Art Mob gallery this Friday, 16 July.
Having delved deep into Art Mob’s extensive stock room, she’s selected 40 fine quality works. Featured are an outstanding group of luminous paintings by the sought after Pitjantjatjara artists Anmanari Brown, Byron Brookes, Jimmy Donegan, Lance Peck, Nyumitja Laidlaw, Cliff Reid and others from the Papulankutja Art Centre at Blackstone and the Tjulyuru Cultural Centre at Warburton; a great variety of works by both famous and emerging Western Desert artists – including a stunning 3.8 metre long masterwork by George Tjungurrayi; vibrant paintings by Utopia artists and a selection of striking paintings and works on paper from the Tiwi Islands, Queensland and TSI. A group of fine sculptures rounds out this imaginative exhibition which is already attracting much attention.
Author: Jeremy Eccles
News source: Australia Art Market Report
“Now, almost forty years after its genesis, the epicentre and dynamic thrust of the Western Desert art movement has dramatically shifted from Papunya, Kintore and Kiwirrkura to Ngaanyatjarra and APY art centres. The untrammelled painting of senior men and women who are new to acrylic on canvas, but who share the same cryptic and powerful iconography, cultural law, song-lines of tjukurpa and towering compassion for country as their Western Desert relatives, are now taking the art world by storm”.
That’s certainly the Big Picture as seen by Judith Ryan, Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria. She was writing in the catalogue for Tjukurpa Pulkatjara, The Power of the Law, which was also the major visual art show at this year’s Adelaide Festival. For this roaring new art movement has spread like wildfire across the Anangu Pitjanjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands so that in the decade since that fire was lit in 2001, 12 art centres opened to serve 15 tiny and remote communities – compared to the decade it took for Yuendemu to follow the lead of Papunya when Aboriginal art first went public in all its complexity in 1971.
There’s also a more intimate portrait of a particular group of mainly women artists who moved from the craft centre at Ernabella well before 2001 to establish Kaltjiti Arts at Fregon in a book by their long-time adviser, Diana James – Painting The Song. And, a little further back in time, there was the pioneering recognition of the new APY energy-source in the 2008 tome, New Beginnings, an enthusiastic compendium of collector Pat Corrigan’s selection of the Aboriginal art that’s happened in that same decade.
From a combined reading of all three I have learnt some of the answers to key questions concerning the mystery of why the Anangu people of the APY Lands waited until this century to join the Aboriginal art party. For history has always recorded Ernabella – the sheep station that became a mission in 1936 – as indisputably the first indigenous art centre in the country in 1948. And Diana James reminds us that it was there in 1940 that the anthropologist Charles Mountford gave brown paper and crayons to a number of people and asked them to draw “black-fellow marks” for him. The resulting 300 drawings (now in the SA State Library) reveal many of the motifs we all became familiar with after 1970 – the art inherent in sand painting, on cave walls, tjuringas and the ceremonial body which was given transportability for the first time.
Sadly, Mountford’s superficial conclusion from this was that the men drew him important foundation myths while the women offered only images related to their hunting and gathering roles.
Of course, the women wouldn’t have revealed their sacred images to a man – whatever his skin colour. But, history has shown that for any number of reasons, Ernabella’s art was, and continues to be based around the women’s analpa walka – beautiful flowing designs verging on realistic representation of plants and insects which were then applied to what we think of as ‘women’s arts’ – weaving and rug-making, ceramics and, above all, batik patterning on silk or cotton material. The men, meanwhile were out and about husbanding animals, and when crafting, created punu, carved wooden animals, etc, decorated with lines burnt by hot wires.
Were these artistic inhibitions forced on them by white advisers? True, the redoubtable Win Hilliard was there for many a year – 32 in fact – during which she stuck manfully to her commission to develop the crafts. Later, an officious Aboriginal Arts Board at the Australia Council would try to restrict the Anangu to craftwork, leaving their northern neighbours, the Pintupi exclusively free to paint on boards and canvas.
But it seems that the real blockage was the religious intensity of the people themselves. The Anangu simply saw no purpose in revealing their spiritual secrets to this weird mob who’d ridden into their lives unbidden in the 1930s. In fact, the ban was so absolute that when Pitjanjatjara men saw early paintings by the first artists of Papunya which clearly revealed stories and songlines that were also part of their liturgy, they physically attacked both art and artists. Diana James believes that it took until 1977, after Papunya Tula artists had moved to disguise the spiritual details with dots and an increasing abstraction, before the Pintupi diplomat, Nospeg Tjupurrula was satisfactorily able to appease the Pitjanjatjara elders with a gift of scared objects
It’s not for nothing that James’s book title is Painting the Song. Her opening lines are: “Kaltjiti artists sing country, dance country, and paint the song of their land. The epic song cycles of the Western Desert peoples have resounded for thousands of years across these sand dunes of Central Australia, echoed back from the orange rock faces of the granite hills, and eddied around the deep blue rockholes where precious waters hide from the scorching sun”. James goes on to explain how song remains an essential part of a painting process she memorably calls “a quality of extroverted ecstasy”. And she concludes, “Painting the song on canvas metamorphoses the flesh of the Tjukurpa from aural tones into the bright tones of acrylic paint that dance before the eye of the beholder, enticing them to listen to the ancient rhythms of the land”
The brilliance of APY works right across the Lands as seen in both New Beginnings and Tjukurpa Pulkatjara, The Power of the Law reveals the full force of an art that’s also urgently needed to pass law on to another generation. That’s what impels a rites leader like Hector Burton of Amata, whose Caterpiller Dreaming paintings emerge spiritually hot from the songs that make the ceremonies.
Painting the Song by Diana James was published last year by McCulloch & McCulloch at $60
Tjukurpa Pulkatjara – The Power of the Law was published this March by Wakefield Press at $40
New Beginnings – Classic Paintings from the Corrigan Collection with texts by Emily McCulloch Childs was published in 2008 by McCulloch & McCulloch at $80
Recent visitor to Queenscliff, Kimberley artist Lloyd Kwilla was featured in several articles including in the Geelong Advertiser Weekend magazine GT last weekend, in a great article by Genna Meade: ‘Painting his Story' (click to read).
Lloyd Kwilla’s solo exhibition, Jumuwarnti: Many Waterholes, is presented by McCulloch & McCulloch, Red Rock Art and Salt Contemporary at Salt Contemporary Gallery, 33-35 Hesse St, Queencliff Victoria and runs til the 30th June, 2010.
This is the first solo exhibition in Victoria by young Kimberley star artist Lloyd Kwilla, with select new works by Freddie Timms and vibrant Utopia paintings by Minnie Pwerle, Barbara Weir, Emily Pwerle, Galya Pwerle, Gloria Petyarre, Freddy Purla and others.
McCulloch & McCulloch, Red Rock Art and Salt Contemporary Art present Lloyd Kwilla: Jumuwarnti (Many Waterholes)
Opening drinks with the artist: Saturday 12 June 5.30 pm
In conversation: Lloyd Kwilla and Kununurra’s Red Rock Art director Kevin Kelly in conversation with Susan McCulloch Sunday 13 June 3.30 pm (Free event)
Thirty-year-old Wangkajunga artist Lloyd Kwilla will travel from his East Kimberley home near the Kimberley hub town of Fitzroy Crossing to attend the opening of his first solo exhibition in Victoria at Queenscliff’s Salt Contemporary on the upcoming Queen’s Birthday long weekend.
Some of the greatest artists of the Aboriginal art movement have come from the varied and dramatic Kimberley region. All have used the ground ochres and pigments from its rich earth to provide a vibrant tapestry of palettes and texture for their signature art.
Lloyd Kwilla is both heir to this tradition and one of the region’s most notable rising stars.
Since this young artist started painting in 2003 with his father – leading painter, medicine man and former stockman Billy Thomas – his work has received hugely favourable response. Three successful solo exhibitions have included a sell-out exhibition in Darwin at the same time as the NATSIAA 2007 and in 2008 a fabulously successful showing in London at Rebecca Hossack Gallery that resulted in a sell-out show and almost 20 commissioned works.
Lloyd Kwilla’s works share the sensual richness of Thomas’s thickly applied ochres, yet possess his own highly distinctive style. Many works are characterised by a strong rhythmic quality, rarely seen in the medium of ochre in which swirls of browns, charcoals, blacks and greys meander, in gently curved lines like a river cutting through sandy soil, linking to waterhole sites.
Having spent his whole life in this country, Kwilla knows both its grandeur and intricacies intimately and portrays these with increasing surety.
Now, for this, his first solo exhibition in Victoria, Kwilla has created an entirely new and fresh body of work under the theme jumuwarnti (many waterholes). Each of these 12 works offers an entirely fresh perspective on this classic theme. They comprise works of impressive scale and intricate mapping as well as those of breathtaking minimalism, reminiscent of the spatial qualities of master Kimberley artists Freddie Timms and Paddy Bedford. In each, Kwilla retains both his own distinctive iconography and subtle crafting of distinctive natural pigments.
Accompanying this major solo show is a select showing of new works by master Kimberley artist Freddie Timms.
SALT CONTEMPORARY ART
33-35 Hesse Street Queenscliff Victoria 3225
McCulloch & McCulloch & Salt Contemporary Art present
Utopia Colour
An exhibition of vibrant Eastern Desert paintings by Minnie Pwerle, Molly Pwerle, Emily Pwerle, Galya Pwerle, Barbara Weir, Gloria Petyarre, Freddy Pwerle, Lizzie Pwerle & Katie Morgan.
June 11-30 2010
Opening drinks: Saturday June 12 @ 5.30 pm
Emily McCulloch Childs will be presenting a walk & talk around Utopia Colour & the exhibition Lloyd Kwilla Jumuwarnti (Many Waterholes) on Sunday, June 20 at 2.30 pm.
For over two decades the Utopia painting school has intrigued and delighted audiences with its bold, unique use of colour. The school’s origins lie in genius colourist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, whose intuitive use of colour in her often monumental paintings drew comparisons to the breakthroughs in colour theory and art made by Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Comparisons were also drawn to the subtlety and reflection of nature’s beauty found in the work of Claude Monet. With the passing of Kngwarreye came a new, even bolder colourist – Kngwarreye’s relative, the octogenarian Minnie Pwerle.
In this exhibition curators Susan McCulloch, Emily McCulloch Childs and Fiona Kelly from Salt Contemporary Art examine Minnie Pwerle and her legacy; her brilliant use of colour within the continuation of her dramatic depictions of Awelye, the women’s ceremony, from her country of Atnwengerrp, laid down in paint by her sisters Emily Pwerle, Molly Pwerle and Galya Pwerle.
These artists are joined by the award-winning Gloria Petyarre, Pwerle’s daughter, the well-known artist Barbara Weir, Pwerle’s grand-son, Freddy Pwerle, and a two of new generation of vibrant Utopia painters: Lizzie Pwerle & Katie Morgan.
To read about Minnie Pwerle and all the artists in the Utopia Colour exhibition please download doc:
Please join us to launch the inaugural edition of 
Susan is off to Tasmania to present her choices at the opening of the Critic’s Choice exhibition at Hobart’s Art Mob gallery this Friday, 16 July.
