Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
recently, many of the most senior artists have become renowned for their highly innovat-
ive depictions of ancestral stories with works of art held in major national and interna-
tional public and private collections. The Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territ-
ory, on the gorgeous location of Bullocky Point, Darwin, presents changing displays
from its extensive collection of work from communities across the NT.
The
art+soul
DVD series (2011, Sydney: ABC Sales & Hibiscus Films) is produced by
one of Australia's most respected indigenous curators and educators, Hetti Perkins. The
series covers a diversity of artists who have had a significant impact on the development
of the contemporary indigenous art scene over the past two decades.
Contemporary Art
Since the early 1970s there have been burgeoning centres of creativity throughout remote
regions, often where clan connections cross government borders, particularly throughout
the Anangu/Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, which include parts of SA, NT
and WA. In the late 1980s to mid-1990s critical and popular focus centred on artists and
work from the communities of Utopia, Haasts Bluff, Papunya and Yuendumu in central
Australia, and Ngukurr in southeast Arnhem Land. In the 1990s, work being created in
communities across Arnhem Land gained national and international acclaim.
The most significant developments over the past three decades have come from urban
and rural-based artists, living in the regions that have experienced the longest impact of
colonisation. Their individual and collective contributions challenged the status quo of
the time, being that 'authentic' Aboriginal art could only be created by artists from re-
mote communities - those regions that supposedly were more 'traditional'. This miscon-
ception overlooked the strong cultural connections held by Aboriginal people whose
families and communities had been moved off their customary homelands, had children
forcibly removed and placed in government and church-operated institutions, lost access
to language and customs, yet who intrinsically retained a sense of indigenous identity,
which was represented - overtly or subtly - in the work they created.
Much of this work was created by artists/activists living, studying and working in ma-
jor metropolitan centres across Australia such as Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide
and Perth. Artist-run initiatives such as Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in
Sydney in 1987, Dumbartung in Perth (1989), Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural
Centre in Adelaide in 1989, and Campfire Group (later Fireworks Gallery) in Brisbane in
1990, were established as a political response to the exclusive nature of the contemporary
mainstream art scene, and the impact of these venues and the artists involved on the un-
informed art world continues to resonate nearly three decades later.
