Hetti Perkins has curated an exhibition of bark paintings by John Mawurndjul and Gulumbu Yunupingu that is currently on display at Tarrawarra Museum of Art. Who are these artists – and how have their lives shaped their artworks?
Articles on Indigenous art
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It hovers uneasily between being a fine-art exhibition showing the diversity and sheer visual and sociocultural potency of contemporary Australian visual art practice, and an older-style ethnographic survey.
The exhibition inevitably raises the ugly head of the Elgin Marbles – but all this noise drowns out the quiet activism of the show itself.
Indigenous artist Dennis Nona is currently serving a jail term for serious crimes. Should the work of the most significant artist to have emerged from the Torres Strait in the last 50 years be removed from gallery walls?
More than a century after he died, the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, who famously fought General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn, is thought of as transcendent force – attuned to the universe in a…
Indigenous Australian practices, honed over thousands of years, weave science with storytelling. In this Indigenous science series, we look at different aspects of First Australians’ traditional life and…
Rock art dated to a minimum age of almost 40,000 years has been discovered in the Maros region of southern Sulawesi, Indonesia. This is an incredible result, published in Nature today, because one of the…
Located off the coast of Darwin in the Northern Territory are the alluring Tiwi Islands. The two inhabited islands – Bathurst and Melville Island – are spectacular to encounter with their red pebble shores…
On the wall hang three portraits of contemporary South Pacific Islanders, some with ships and all with duty stamps in the foreground. Skulls of sealed raw sugar glisten on a table. Bitter Sweet is the…
I entered the secretive world of a maximum-security prison for children in Sydney’s Western suburbs for four months earlier this year. My passport into this highly restrictive world was an artist residency…
For over a thousand generations Aboriginal people made no distinction between art and craft. Art was, and still is, a way of life and as much about function as it is about beauty and form. Artistic forms…
Over the past three and a half years nearly every major public and private art collection in Australia has acquired large-scale paintings by a north Queensland artist from the Aboriginal community of Aurukun…
This week, The Australian reported that a hand stencil found in a controversial coal mining development in the Blue Mountains was a “fake”. The story has also been reported by the BBC and was picked up…
We are driving late at night along a highway that crosses the remote Kimberley region of northern Western Australia. We are in an area known as the Fitzroy Valley, about 3,500 kilometres north of Perth…
This unconventional review of an exhibition, Jinjilngali, Kurlukuku Minpiya, Yirdingali, now on show at the Vivien Anderson Gallery in Melbourne, also constitutes a tribute to three Warlpiri women artists…
A rich inventory of monstrous figures exists throughout Aboriginal Australia. The specific form that their wickedness takes depends to a considerable extent on their location. In the Australian Central…
Top contributors
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Joanna Mendelssohn is a Friend of The Conversation.Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
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Chair in Rock Art Research and Director of the Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU), Griffith University
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Professorial Research Fellow, Adelaide University
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Honorary Professor, Edith Cowan University
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Honorary Senior Lecturer, Australian National University
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Professor, College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities, Adelaide University
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Distinguished Professor of Design History, UTS, University of Technology Sydney
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Chancellor’s Indigenous Research Fellow, Faculty of Design and Society, University of Technology Sydney
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Adjunct professor, Adelaide University
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Professor, Critical Indigenous Studies and Director of The Centre for Global Indigenous Futures, Macquarie University
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Professor, Australian and Aboriginal History, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, Convenor: Indigenous Land & Justice Research Group, UNSW
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Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University
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Professor, Director of Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, The University of Western Australia
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Senior Curator of Australian and First Nations Art, National Gallery of Victoria, The University of Melbourne
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Professor, The University of Melbourne