The story of modern art was never carved in stone, and in fact is under constant revision. Museums intent on “updating the canon,” a deceptively snappy term that refers to the upgrading (and downgrading) of reputations, have lately bestowed essential attention on many once-dismissed artists, from Hilma af Klint, the Swedish pioneer of abstraction; to Jack Whitten, an African-American abstract painter from Alabama; to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a Native American artist whose work was once seen as more suitable for an ethnographic museum than a fine-arts one.
Of the many recent discoveries, none has proven more exciting or aesthetically persuasive than that of contemporary Australian Indigenous art, which refers to a painting movement that began in the early 1970s in the red-rock desert of Australia. Today, as a profusion of exhibitions of Indigenous artists win admirers at museums and galleries in the West, you can say that Ab Or, if I may call it that for short, is raising fascinating questions. For instance, how is it that Australian Indigenous groups have been way ahead of the West in paying homage to female artists? Many of their best-known painters are women, and their work comes to us unaccompanied by woeful stories about husbands and male counterparts who overshadowed them.
For starters, the artist known as Sally Gabori began painting at age of 81 and had her first one-woman show in New York in 2025. Her large-scale canvases, which might stretch 20 feet wide, capture the lost coastal land of her childhood in immense, jagged planes of color, with hot pinks sizzling against cool whites. Makinti Napanangka, by contrast, paints tightly coiled linear networks in irresistible hues of yellow, orange and cream. When I look at her bunches of curving lines, I think of fingers and of counting, of a grand tally of pathways crossed on sunshine-y days.
And then there’s Emily Kam Kngwarray, an elder of the Anmatyerr people who died in 1996 and is now a bona fide international sensation. Her 2025 retrospective at London’s Tate Modern was the first solo show at the museum devoted to an Australian Indigenous artist. Emily’s story is an improbable, nearly unbelievable one about a woman who started painting in her mid-70s and produced more than 3,000 works in the last eight years of her life. Like other Australian Indigenous artists, she had no academic training, not that art school was ever a guarantee of mastery.
Or so I thought recently as I stood in front of her “Kame Yam Awelye,” a powerful and tender 5-foot painting that brings the trailing yam roots of her ancestors into the present. Here is the world remade as an underground, undulating tangle of roots in red, white and luscious pinks set off against a black ground. The roots grow dense toward the edges of the canvas, but thin towards the center, leaving an open, empty pocket of space, a mystery that no brush can touch.
The subject of the painting is what scholars call The Dreaming, the theme of all Australian Indigenous art. It refers to stories passed down to painters by their parents, and their parents’ parents before them, recounting the mythical role of their ancestors in the creation of the earth. Most of the stories relate to the landscape, but I would hesitate to call the paintings “landscapes”. They’re composed from an inherited pictorial vocabulary that was developed and refined over, oh, only 65,000 years, and which veers between the real world and a vividly imagined one.
Is any other art movement both so old and new at the same time? Contemporary Australian Indigenous painting has an official start date of 1971, an era when Minimalist artists in New York were turning out gleaming metal cubes and confidently proclaiming that “painting is dead.” Unknown to them, painting was acquiring dramatic new life 10,000 miles away, in Australia. Many major movements in art owe their existence to a change in medium or in art materials. In the case of the Australian Indigenous people, the renaissance began in the Papunya settlement outside Alice Springs, when, encouraged by a schoolteacher visiting from Sydney, a group of Indigenous elders accustomed to painting on unstable ephemeral surfaces, such as sand, eucalyptus tree bark, or their own flesh, were introduced to the permanent medium of fiberboard.
The title of this website, “Two Collections,” might sound inexplicably generic for a group of artworks that were assembled by four individuals who happen to command stellar reputations as art collectors (and, in one case, as an actor and banjo-player). But they chose not to name the website after themselves, perhaps because they were being modest, or perhaps because they thought that the combination of multiple surnames would make this project sound more like a white-shoe law firm than an attempt at art appreciation.
In truth, there is a wonderful logic to the title “Two Collections,” which spans two distinct generations in Australian Indigenous art. The collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson starts with paintings that date from 1971, and abounds with masterworks on fiberboard by now-famous (mostly male) elders such as Johnny Warangkula Jumpurrulla, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. These are the paintings that flash to mind when most people think of Australian Indigenous art. They tend to be modestly scaled and handsomely colored in browns, blacks and whites. They include symbols and pictograms, especially concentric circles, and mesmerizing overlays of stick-painted dots. They established contemporary Australian Indigenous art as “the last great art movement of the 20th century,” as the late Robert Hughes, the eloquent Australian-born, New York-based art critic, claimed with only minimal chauvinism.
The collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield, by contrast, focuses on later works, if by later we mean paintings from the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. Instead of boards, the later works are painted on canvas, which spawned its own artistic innovations, especially in terms of size. As the paintings expanded in scale, colors brightened, and lines lengthened.
For instance, George “Hairbrush” Tjungurrayi gave up a dot-studded style in favor of linear labyrinths.” His paintings can put you in mind of the buzzy, vibrating lines of Op art or the pinstripe paintings of Frank Stella. Tjungurrayi’s paintings are unquestionably abstract, but calling them so does not bring us closer to understanding them. The concept of abstraction as defined by post-war critics like Clement Greenberg is irrelevant for Australian Indigenous artists, who never set out to purge their work of narrative or to focus on painting’s inherent flatness. They do not want to decouple their art from the world in which they wake up every morning and look out at sacred terrain. Their attention to the land and its stewardship is another way their art remains startlingly relevant. As we in the West try to halt the destruction of the planet, it is easy to feel moved by the tender feelings for nature that wind through Australian Indigenous art. So much Western art has been devoted to enshrining the human figure, a subject that is almost non-existent in Indigenous art. There are no traditional portraits. Artists define their identity through topographical features rather than facial ones.
Moreover, Australian Indigenous artists were mining the concept of identity long before it became the main mission of contemporary artists. For most of the 20th-century, Western artists beholden to avant-garde ideas sought to disrupt and challenge, to “epater le bourgeoisie” or offend bourgeois taste. But among artists today, such transgressive goals have largely been replaced by the notion of art as a shared space for the exploration of identity. Artists are turning to race, gender, ethnicity, and other markers to reflect on their heritage and vulnerable place in the world.
Few groups have been more vulnerable, in socioeconomic terms, than Indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islander people, who number about one million of Australia’s 25 million people. They did not receive the right to vote in federal Australian elections until the early 1960's, and they were excluded from being counted as part of the national population until 1971. Moving to cities is not an option for many Indigenous Australians who feel tethered to the remote desert lands of their ancestors.
The more you see of their work, the more you realize that the stronger Australian Indigenous artists each has a distinct, instantly recognizable style. Their paintings owe as much to the vicissitudes of individual talent as to their shared devotion to the timeless subject matter of Country and The Dreaming. In some ways, we are just getting to know their work and awakening to its presence in the United States. That, of course, is the reason for this website, to provide everyone from established scholars to curious observers with a chance to familiarize themselves with two collections that rank among the finest holdings in private hands.
A hundred years ago, Pablo Picasso famously appropriated the forms of African tribal art for his “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in an effort to infuse his work with what was seen as a “primitive” roughness, an emotional directness unconstrained by convention. But today, even with our incomplete knowledge of a new field, it is clear that Australian Indigenous art defies every stereotype about the untrammeled Other and should be viewed instead as a model of extraordinary artistic refinement. It is easy to feel moved not only by the sumptuous beauty of its art, but also by the values of a society that lavishes heartfelt respect on older artists, the idea of community, and the physical splendor of the earth itself.
