Word: papunya
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Exhibition organizer Nakayama calls the Western Desert painting movement "a very evolutionary contemporary art," and "Prism" offers some of its key turning points-from a board of the early phase at Papunya, when European materials were first introduced to the desert community in 1971, to Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's Man's Love Story, 1978, the first dot painting to be bought by a public art gallery. But where the exhibition breaks new ground is in exploring the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous art. In a room to the right of Love Story, the Australian art divide is made spurious...
...year Papunya's Honey Ant mural was casually whitewashed over, Rover Thomas experienced a series of dreams at Warmun, 1,000 km northwest in the East Kimberley's diamond country. An old woman had recently died, and in his dreams her spirit flew eastward, encountering the land and its sacred sites. Former stockman Thomas' visions were later recorded on boards and held aloft during a ceremony known as Gurrir Gurrir. These boards grew into a contemporary art movement, made famous by the late Thomas' Rothko-like swathes of ocher necklaced by sun-bursting dots (in 2001, his All That...
...What is certain is that the activity is generally confined to the Western Desert communities around Alice Springs, where the highest concentration of artists live. Here the pressure has been mounting ever since Geoffrey Bardon began marketing the prized work of his Papunya artists in 1971. Incorporated the following year, Papunya Tula Artists were turning over $A1 million a year by 1988, and their success did not go unnoticed. When the exhibition "Dreamings" toured to New York in 1988, "all of a sudden taxi drivers and carpetbaggers from the desert were rocking up with works by the same artists rolled...
...Collaboration is the cornerstone of Aboriginal art practice, and nowhere was this more apparent than at Papunya, 250 dirt kilometers west of Alice Springs. Around the same time as the Yirrkala people were presenting their bark petition to parliament, hundreds of desert nomads were gathering at the settlement as part of the government's assimilation policy. Far from their Pintupi, Arrernte, Warlpiri and Luritja homelands, the Papunya mob were caught in "the agony of exile," Perkins has written. Driving his VW into town in 1971, Sydney art teacher Geoffrey Bardon wasn't thinking of starting a revolution. But by encouraging...
...Like desert flowers after the rain, Papunya also inspired a new blossoming of art centers across the border into South Australia. As a founder of Irrunytju Arts, Tommy Watson, a Pitjantjatjara man in his late 60s, is one of the new kids on the block. But with the eye-popping palette of his enamel-fired ceiling-which depicts a rock hole in his grandfather's country in a blaze of hot pink, green and red-we see the full bloom of the Western Desert three storeys above a Paris street...