Aboriginal Art in America

The Kluge-Ruhe is opening a new exhibition! It's called Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu (Past & Present Together): 50 Years of Papunya Tula Artists.

Papunya Tula is a collective of Aboriginal artists in The Australian Western Desert. In this episode, we get a sneak peak of the new exhibit and Henry Skerritt tells us why these paintings are so important to the history of Aboriginal Art.

And stay tuned! Over the coming weeks, we're going to share a lot more about this very special exhibit and the artworks on display.

Bush Tucker Dreaming, 1988

Recently, the team at Kluge-Ruhe unrolled a canvas that had been sitting unseen in their collection for a long time. When they finally saw it, it got the team thinking about medium and the creativity that artists unleashed when they started to experiment with painting on canvas. 

Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa

Gabriel Maralngurra is an Aboriginal Australian artist from Gunbalayna in Western Arnhem Land. Gabriel enjoys speaking with others and sharing his own knowledge about painting and Aboriginal traditions so that his culture lives on. He maintains great relations with the curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Art Collection, Henry Skerritt, and virtually joined Skerritt's class in March of 2021 to share his wisdom with students at the University of Virginia.

Episode produced by Sydney Pulliam.

The Waterbird Dance brings death to life. Aboriginal artist David Malangi Daymirringu’s work honors Yolngu ceremony; more specifically, that of the Manharngu clan. A well-known senior artist, Malangi painted and travelled internationally to represent his community and share his art until his death in 1999. In typical fashion of the art of Arnhem Land, Waterbird Dance is a painting of ochre, charcoal and white clay on bark. Malangi depicts Manharngu clan totems engaged in a transitional ceremony in a vibrant, packed composition to grab the attention of international audiences and celebrate and preserve the traditions of his country.

David Malangi Daymirringu

This episode was produced by Callie Collins.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye was one of the first celebrated female Aboriginal Australian Desert Painters. Entering the national art market well into her seventies, Kngwarreye paved the way for female Aboriginal artists to express women's specific cultural relationship to the Dreaming and their ancestral lands. In My County, Kngwarreye uses a vibrantly colored dotting technique, popularized in Papunya. While only she knows the true stories and secrets that lay hidden within the canvas, all viewers can appreciate My Country for its immensely beautiful and imposing presence.

My Country

Standing at six feet tall, the sculpture “Nullius in Verba III” is intentionally the same height and weight as its sculptor, Steaphan Paton. The metal, diamond-shaped shield, mounted on a long pole, confronts the viewer. The shield’s surface is scratched, evoking the centuries of violence and dispossession faced by Paton’s ancestors. Among closer inspection, however, the sculpture is made from modern materials, asserting that this violence against Indigenous Australians is not an historic anecdote but a contemporary issue. 

In deep reds, pinks, and yellows, Emily Kame Kngwarreye's "Awely" is an embodiment of her connection with her Country. Kngwarreye began painting late in her life, when she was already an elder in her community, Utopia, in Australia’s Northern Territory. The artwork’s title refers to women’s ceremonial knowledge of song, dance, medicine, and designs painted on the body. As Kngwarreye applied heavy blotches of paint to her canvases, she would sing ceremonial songs, replicating the act of painting on skin. In this way, “Awely” is both a painting of Kngwarreye’s homeplace and a conversation with it.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

A solitary figure emerges from an urgent flurry of charcoal lines. Vernon Ah Kee’s “Unwritten” is a potent metaphor for the struggle of indigenous artists to control their identities amid the continuing pressures of racism and colonial oppression. In 2004, Ah Kee began a series of large scale photorealistic charcoal portraits of his family members. These works were based upon ethnographic photos taken by the anthropologist Norman Tyndale on Palm Island during the 1930s. In enlarging these images to an imposing scale, Ah Kee returns power to their gaze, reclaiming the ethnographic photography for those who are once its subjects.

Vernon Ah Kee

Freshwater Saltwater Weave is a series of glass works by contemporary urban-based Arrernte artist Jenni Kemarre Martiniello. Her works in hot blown glass, coldworked glass and canes are inspired by the aesthetics of Aboriginal woven forms. The works in this exhibition span the last five years and are inspired by dilly bags, eel traps, fish traps, fish baskets, and bicornual baskets.

Yellow Rushes Fish Basket