Ninuku Women Artists to travel to the Big Apple

Yangi Yangi Fox will travel to NYC for the opening of Ancient Land New Territory (image courtersy Ninuku Arts & Paul Exline) “This is the most extensive and impressive body of work the Art Centre has ever shown" Claire Eltringham, Manager Ninuku Arts

In one of the biggest exhibitions to be held in the USA during 2012, South Australia's Ninuku Arts will showcase a group of stunning new works in New York City.

MANTA IRITITJANGKU NGURA KUTJUPALAKUTU  AANCIENT LAND NEW TERRITORY opens Wednesday May 30th at gallery nine5 in Soho.

Ninuku Artists Unlike the few well-established Art Centres who have braved the international market so far, Ninuku Arts is unique in that they are only an emerging art centre, just over 5 years old. They are based in a small and peaceful community known as Kalka in the western APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) Lands in the South Australian desert. The art centre represents artists from two communities – Pipalyatjara and Kalka. They are among the most remote in the district, some 8-9 hours from the nearest major shopping precinct.

It is a remarkable achievement for such small art centre to produce such an extensive group (some 30 odd works) and show them overseas to a relatively untapped audience. As artist Yangi Yangi Fox describes, “We’ve got a lovely little art centre, a little house where we work. We work there painting our Dreaming stories. We send them lots of places. So people will see (them) and understand that our country is full of Dreaming and Law, our Tjukurpa.”

There is an unequivocal buzz around the APY Lands where Ninuku Arts is based. The district is now hailed as one of the most dynamic in the whole of Australia. This brave exhibit by Ninuku Arts is to show the world just how impressive this work truly is. As Claire Eltringham, the art centre manager remarked, “This is the most extensive and impressive body of work the Art Centre has ever shown. It has been in the making for over 16 months. The artists have all been working hard to make this a success. Arts SA, OFTA (Office of the Arts) and some generous philanthropic bodies have all contributed towards this project to make it such a success.”

Accompanying the exhibition is a cultural program that will act as an educational tool for a new and enthusiastic audience. As part of the program, a short film will be shown which was made in Kalka community last year. The short film was self-funded by the art centre and features interviews with artists who are involved in the show, provides insight into the environment where the paintings derive and footage taken in the art centre itself. Anthropologist and fluent Pitjantjatjara speaker, Dr Diana James assisted with interviews and translations, while documentary filmmaker Rachael Thornton filmed, edited and produced the short film. Like the exhibition itself, the artists are the true stars of the film.

For the opening event,  Yangi Yangi Fox & Punitjina Monica Watson will attend the exhibition and perform Inma – the dances and songs associated with their home in Australia. The guest artists will also share the stories of their artworks giving the audience a rare opportunity to gain personal insight into both their works and their culture. There will be a full-colour, 60 page exhibition catalogue which will be available both within Australia and internationally. It is hoped that the exhibition will spark newfound interest in the Indigenous art industry and teach people beyond Australian shores, about the celebrated culture of Indigenous Australia. Paintings of an ancient culture travelling to a new and unchartered territory: This is truly something to celebrate!

Exhibition catalogs can be ordered within Australia by contacting Ninuku Arts or outside Australia through Harvey Art Projects USA.

Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Kaplan & Levi Collection

Seattle Art Museum May 31–September 2, 2012
SAM Simonyi Special Exhibition Galleries

An exuberant visual language has sprung out of Aboriginal artists across the continent of Australia. While this language occasionally looks extremely modern, it depicts unexpected subjects. One elder artist used paint with great bravado to take viewers underground to watch a yam grow. Another painted vivid stripes to enable viewers to stand by the edge of a shimmering salt lake. Epics that involve shape shifting ancestors and short stories devoted to the flora and fauna of their country are given visual form. A sudden abundance of art production since the 1970s has been described as a renaissance of the world’s oldest living culture.

In 2012, an exhibition that explores this unusual chapter of art history will be unveiled. It will feature over 100 artworks from the late 20th to early 21st century—paintings on canvas; ochres on bark; sculptures carved of wood, woven of fiber and cast in bronze. One observer cites Aboriginal culture as having the ability to induce a type of “intellectual vertigo,” or a sense of displacement from usual routines. Landscapes without horizon lines, paintings about Laws, portraits of ancestral beings, still lifes devoted to bush foods and poles that commemorate people’s lives are all evidence of Aboriginal creativity giving rise to a dynamic art movement. –Pam McClusky, Curator of Art of Africa and Oceania

"Caring For Painters & Their Families" Papunya Tula Artists Fundraiser

Harvey Art Projects USA sincerely thanks all who supported our recent fundraiser for Papunya Tula Artists Aged Care Fund. This was the first time the gallery hosted such an important event to raise awareness of the challenges faced by many indigenous artists living in remote desert regions of Australia. We also thank Mr Paul Sweeney, General Manager of Papunya Tula Artists for presenting a very well received lecture & slidewhow.

Forty Years of Papunya Tula Artists

Harvey Art Projects proudly presents a 40th anniversary USA exhibition from the founders of the Western Desert Art Movement.

The Papunya Tula Art movement began when a schoolteacher from Melbourne, Geoffrey Bardon, encouraged some of the men to paint a blank school wall. The mural sparked a tremendous interest in the community and soon many men started painting. In 1972, the artists successfully established their own company. The Papunya Tula painting style derives directly from the artists' knowledge of traditional body and sand painting associated with ceremony. To portray these dreamtime creation stories for the public, has required the removal of some sacred symbols and the careful monitoring of ancestral designs. The work of the Papunya Tula artists is highly regarded. The high standard of the work and its unmistakable and powerful style has resulted in the Papunya Tula artists being represented in most public galleries, major museums, institutions and many large private collections within Australia as well as overseas. The aim of the company is to promote individual artists, provide economic development for the communities to which they belong, and assist in the maintenance of a rich cultural heritage.

Barrku! Exhibit opening night photos

We had a great opening night at Harvey Art Projects in Ketchum featuring the beautiful works from Buku-Larrngay Mulka Artists.  Wukun Wanambi played Yolngul clapstick and sang while Randin Graves accompanied on the didgeridoo. The show is open through January. 

 

 

The Art of Cultural Surivial - Aboriginal Exhibition Comes to Sun Valley

by TONY EVANS, Express Staff Writer

Curator Julie Harvey stands beside a display of Mokoy Spirit figures from northeast Arnhem Land in Australia. According to cultural tradition, when the artist dies, these particular poles will never be made again. Photo by Willy

The value of modern art can be as much about the mystique of an individual as what the canvas holds. In today's market, reputation and a recognizable style can mean everything.

Indigenous artists are no different, but the significance of traditional designs can extend far beyond the limits of one artist's personality.

For centuries the indigenous Yolngul people of northeast Arnhem Land in Australia have connected with ancestral beings through song, dance and painting. Their artwork has been used to lay claim to a remote region of islands and seacoast not far from Indonesia.

This week, the Harvey Art Project Gallery at 391 First Ave. N. in Ketchum will host a multidisciplinary exhibition of artists, singers and musicians from Arnhem Land, where making art has become a matter of cultural survival.

"An artist inherits rights to a story when they are initiated," said curator Julie Harvey. "There are several layers of initiation, each with more knowledge and more information."

Harvey studied at the Adelaide School of Fine Art, specializing in Australian Aboriginal traditions. She and her husband, photographer Paul Exline, will visit Arnhem Land in May, after the temperature cools off.

"It's about 110 degrees there now," she said.

The Harvey Art Project will host "Barrku: Treasures From a Distant Land" from Dec. 29-30, featuring short films and a talk at the Community Library in Ketchum, and traditional ceremonies and music at the gallery.

Visiting artist Wukun Wanabi will tell stories about the Yolngu people. He will be joined by Buku Larrngay Mulka Art Center Manager Kade McDonald.

The Art Center is located in Yirrkala in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. Arnhem Land has been occupied by indigenous people for tens of thousands of years and is where archeologists discovered the oldest-known stone axe, which scholars believe to be 35,500 years old.

"These are the oldest continual artistic traditions on earth," she said. "Some artists came out of the bush as late as 1983 totally naked, living fully as hunter-gatherers.

In the desert regions of Australia, Aboriginal people navigated on long walks using "song lines," which correlated landmarks, and "Dream-Time" stories with traditional songs and rhythms. Knowledgeable people could sing their way across hundreds of miles of the Australian outback, crossing ethnic and linguistic barriers en route to distant places.

Aboriginal Treasures

Artist, art and ceremony from Australia coming to valley

by JENNIFER LIEBRUM, Arts Editor, Mountain Express

 Nawurapu Wunungmurra, Mokoy Spirit Figures, natural ochers on carved softwood. Photo: Paul ExlineArt as a cultural exchange will be among the Christmas offerings next week as Harvey Art Projects Gallery presents "Barrku: Treasures From a Distant Land."

The gallery at 391 First Ave. N. in Ketchum is a dedicated Australian indigenous art space, one of a few in the United States. This will be the first-ever exhibit of art on bark from a remote art center in the tiny township of Yirrkala in northeast Arnhem Land in Australia.

"Barrku" has two meanings—far away and something of excellence.

This exhibit of barks, "mokoys" (spirit figures) and "larrikitj" (ceremonial poles) has been almost two years in preparation, and artist Wukun Wanambi and Harvey art adviser Kade MacDonald will be travelling from Australia for both the official opening and to host a community cultural events program that starts Thursday, Dec. 29, at the Community Library in Ketchum. 

Four short films will begin Thursday at 6 p.m., followed by comments by Wanambi and MacDonald, who elaborate on the art and culture of the Yolngu people.

During Friday's Gallery Walk, the exhibit will officially kick off with a traditional ceremony incorporating music and song by Wanambi at 6.30 p.m. at the gallery.

http://www.mtexpress.com/index2.php?ID=2005140029

ART & HEALTH IN THE DESERT

It has been 11 years since Pintupi people painted pictures and raised one million dollars at the Art Gallery of NSW. Their aim was to improve the lives of their family members forced to leave their country and receive dialysis in Alice Springs. They set up the Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation (WDNWPT) and changed the face of kidney disease in Kintore as we were able to get people home to live on country and with family.

http://www.aboriginalartnews.com.au/2011/12/art-health-in-the-desert.php

TJUKURRTJANU: ORIGINS OF WESTERN DESERT ART AT THE NGV

A collaboration between the NGV and Museum Victoria

In partnership with Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd            

A National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition 

This important exhibition features 200 of the first paintings produced at Papunya in 1971 to 72 by the founding artists of the Western Desert art movement. These seminal works sparked the genesis of the Papunya Tula movement, now internationally recognised as one of the most important events in Australian art history.

The founding Papunya Tula artists drew on a rich tradition of iconographic signs and symbols to create these early works. The exhibition establishes a connection between the works of art themselves and their sources in ephemeral designs made for use in ceremony. The period from 1971 to 1972 was a critical turning point when the ancient visual language of the Western Desert was rendered permanent on sheets of composition board and thereby transformed into a rich new art form: artefact became art. Tjukurrtjanu includes paintings, shields, spear throwers, stone knives, historical photographs, headbands and body ornaments. 

 http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/exhibitions/tjukurrtjanu-origins-of-western-desert-art

RICH PRIZE GOES TO ARNHEM LAND ARTIST

Gunybi Ganambarr, a Yolngu artist from the tiny Arnhem Land town of Yirrkala, 700 km east of Darwin, won the $50,000 top prize in the $65,000 Western Australia Indigenous Art Awards lst night.

Selected from more than 170 national nominations, the 38-year-old Ganambarr won Australia's richest Aboriginal Art prize for his group of paintings and sculptures.

Yulparija artist Jan Billycan, from Bidydanga, south of Broome, won the $10,000 best WA artist award at the opening of the awards exhibition at the Art Gallery of WA. Their works are displayed with those of 14 other finalists as a centrepiece of the arts festival associated with CHOGM in October.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/10034041/rich-prize-goes-to-arnhem-land-artist/

MAKINTI NAPANANGKA RECEIVES AM

Painter Makinti Napanangka has been posthumously named a Member of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday honours. The award recognises Napanangka as a respected community member, senior Pintupi cultural custodian and matriarch to her extended family. Foremost, she is identified as a highly esteemed artist and a leading figure in the emergence of women painters of the Western Desert art movement.

Papunya Tula Artists’ general manager Paul Sweeney reflects: “History will remember her as a seminal artist and one that elevated and improved, not just her own life, but that of her entire family and to a large extent her whole community.”

Jacqueline Nakamarra adds: “I am happy for my mother. I’m happy. When Napanangka painted she was laughing and smiling. Dancing and telling stories about the early days. I am happy for people to see and know her paintings and country. She painted stories about Lupul and the time when she was young. When she painted - telling the story for Lupul, she would laugh. She was happy and laughing when she was painting in Kintore at Papunya Tula. She worried about her granddaughters and grandsons. We can see all of the paintings and this [award] makes us feel happy and proud for her.”

http://www.artcollector.net.au/MakintiNapanangkareceivesAM

COLLECTING THE DOTS

Collecting the Dots  by Carly Berwick

ArtNews May 2010 Issue 

In a few decades, the seemingly abstract compositions of Australia's aboriginal artists have moved from body painting and sand mosaics to board to acrylics on canvas—and to the walls of major museums.

http://www.aboriginalartnews.com.au/2010/05/collecting-the-dots.php