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Collectors and museums worldwide relish the striking color and intricate patterning of paintings created by Aboriginal artists living in Australia’s central desert region. The paintings’ nuanced expressions of Aboriginal culture and history reinforce their significance as vital works of art. Lands of Enchantment: Australian Aboriginal Painting presents twenty-seven works from the never-before-exhibited collection of Ann Shumelda Okerson and James J. O’Donnell of New Haven, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. This still-growing collection attests to the potent allure of paintings from this part of the world.
Over the past two decades the fine arts media has avidly covered auction sales of Aboriginal paintings as well as their presence at high-profile international contemporary art fairs and exhibitions. Museums across Australia have presented scores of exhibitions centering on Aboriginal art, with European and American museums following suit. In 2006, NMWA blazed a trail for female Aboriginal artists with the exhibition Dreaming Their Way: Australian Aboriginal Women Painters.
Ann Okerson and her husband James O’Donnell began collecting Aboriginal paintings in 1997, the same year that canvases by Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1916–1996), an artist whose work is now included in their collection, made headlines at the prestigious Venice Biennale. The couple had not actively collected art previously, but during a visit to Sydney, Australia, they purchased a painting by Pansy Napangati (b. c. 1948, Luritja-Warlpiri group). Okerson and O’Donnell were captivated by the artwork’s lush composition and intense colors and were eager to learn more about the artist’s process and perspective. They have since returned to Australia many times, building their collection by traveling to the desert region and visiting galleries and cultural centers. Although their collection comprises primarily art by women, the inclusion of male artists in Lands of Enchantment demonstrates the broader context of Aboriginal painting.
Most Aboriginal paintings are expressive representations of the “Dreaming.” Dreaming is the English word commonly used to describe the Aboriginal cosmology, which includes narratives about the Aboriginal people’s ancestral beings and their epic journeys during which they created the world and established moral codes and social laws. Aboriginal painters extend the ancient tradition of drawing abstract or semi-abstract designs on the body or into the earth during ceremonies that commemorate the Dreaming.
The Aboriginal people’s struggle in the 1970s and 1980s to secure rights to their land dovetailed with their desire to reaffirm the vitality of Aboriginal culture. Aboriginal art centers formed in desert communities such as Papunya, Yuendumu, Utopia, and Balgo Hills. Some non-Aboriginals who wished to illuminate Aboriginal culture for other non-Aboriginals provided silk and wax (for batik), watercolor, and, eventually, acrylic paint and encouraged the artists to render the Dreaming stories that belonged to each of their families.
Initially, non-Aboriginal people working at the art centers believed that only men had the knowledge to paint the stories of the Dreaming; women worked primarily as assistants to their painter-husbands and -fathers. (Pansy Napangati, the first artist to enter the Okerson-O’Donnell collection, was exceptional for independently creating paintings in the early 1970s.) Of course, women did have their own ritual knowledge, and women’s art groups–such as the Warlpiri women’s group in Yuendumu, which pioneered the use of acrylic paint in the early 1980s–ultimately proved to be among the most dynamic forces in Aboriginal painting.1
The ritual enactments of the Dreaming are sacred, and details cannot be shared with those outside of an artist’s family group. Consequently, artists develop a modified visual language to produce their paintings. Working with vivid acrylics rather than natural, earth-toned pigments used in ceremonies, Aboriginal painters often create dense compositions saturated with a kaleidoscope of color. In her dazzling Janganpa Jukurrpa (Possum Dreaming), 2006, Bessie Nakamarra Sims (b. c. 1932, Warlpiri group) used thousands of bright pink, purple, yellow, and blue dots to render the squiggling lines that possums’ tails leave in the sand as they search for food.
Because Dreamings often center on the formation of the landscape, many paintings suggest topographical views of artists’ homelands. Eubena Nampitjin (b. c. 1925, Kukatja group) is a skilled hunter who spends much time in the bush surrounding the Balgo Hills community. Many of Nampitjin’s paintings, including Kunawarritji, c. 2006, represent the sand hills that dominate the landscape around Balgo Hills.
From ritual body paint and sand designs, Aboriginal artists have developed traditional visual motifs that are shared by painters from a variety of language groups. Often formed from massed groups of dots, the shapes include concentric circles, u-shapes, and curved and straight lines. Some of the paintings by men in the Okerson-O’Donnell collection demonstrate a highly orderly application of the motifs. In his monumental Ceremony–Mulga Seed Dreaming, 1999, Lindsay Bird Mpetyane (b. 1935, Anmatyerre group) uses clean-edged circles and parallel lines to suggest the branches and roots of the Mulga tree. Conversely, Bush Melon Ceremony, 2003, by female artist Minnie Pwerle (c. 1910–2006) features a maze of multicolored and variously sized oval shapes that resemble the ceremonial body paint designs used by women in Pwerle’s Anmatyerre/Alyawarre group.
A painter often focuses on a single motif by enlarging and repeating it, sometimes drawing it closer to abstraction. Makinti Napanangka (b. 1930, Pintupi group) paints broad fields of color bordered by wide stripes. The soft shapes of her Hairstring, 2006, cannily evoke the gentle movement of the swirling hair skirts and belts worn by women during ceremonies. Most of the mature paintings by Mitjili Napurrula (b. c. 1945, Pintupi group) represent trees–the source for the spears that are the focal point of the Dreaming that belonged to her father. Napurrula developed the innovative format in Watiya Tjuta (Trees), 2003, in which large paddle-shaped leaves and branches are silhouetted against a stark white background.
Some Aboriginal artists have moved even farther away from representation. Dorothy Napangardi Robinson (b. c. 1956, Warlpiri group) is renowned for her ethereal black-and-white paintings in which lacy strands of tiny dots seem to float above the canvas. In Awelye–Bush Hen Dreaming (2005), Abie Loy Kemarre (b. 1972, Eastern Anmatyerre group) painted a grid of white cross-hatched blocks over a black background. Kemarre’s lines are so densely drawn that, from a distance, the canvas appears to be covered with a solid coat of pale gray paint. Greeny Purvis Petyarre (b. 1930, Anmatyerre group), the eldest nephew of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, rendered his Yam Dreaming, 2003, with narrow ribbons of paint that represent the various stages of yam seeds’ growth. These paintings with subtle, allusive qualities appeal to non-Aboriginal viewers who also favor abstract and abstract-expressionist art forms, to which Western critics often compare this type of Aboriginal art.
Aboriginal paintings from central Australia are visually intense and conceptually ambiguous. Ann Okerson and James O’Donnell observe: “We’re interested in the way these artists have managed to find the way to produce work that speaks so powerfully to so many, and that at the same time has hidden depths, meanings, and stories that non-Aboriginal people like us will never be allowed to get near.” Australian Aboriginal art encompasses a vast range of inventive and engaging work, from traditional bark painting to cutting-edge installations, videos, and performances. But the exquisite tension and mystery of the desert paintings continue to enchant admirers around the world.
Notes
1. Françoise Dussart, Yuru-Yurula: Women’s Painting from Yuendumu, Warlpiri Women and Acrylic Paintings (Charlottesville: Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, 2009).
Kathryn A. Wat is curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Lands of Enchantment: Australian Aboriginal Painting is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and is generously sponsored by Chevron, the Embassy of Australia, and the Members of NMWA.
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