Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu: Contemporary Aboriginal Painting from the Australian Desert is the first U.S. exhibition to survey Australia’s most globally recognized Aboriginal art movement. For the past five decades, Papunya Tula Artists—the oldest Aboriginal-owned arts organization in Australia—has stood at the forefront of contemporary Aboriginal art, producing some of the most iconic art and artists in Australian history.
In 1971, at the remote township of Papunya, a small group of Aboriginal men began painting their ancestral designs with acrylic paint on scraps of cardboard, Masonite, and linoleum. From these humble beginnings, a multimillion-dollar industry would emerge, changing the face of contemporary art and creating a powerful voice for Indigenous artists that reverberates into the present. Inspired by the sweeping ancestral landscape of the Australian desert, it is one of the world’s greatest stories of resilience, self-determination, and the power of art.
The township of Papunya was founded in 1959 as a settlement for Aboriginal people who were relocated from their desert homelands. Living in cramped conditions, the community brought together people of diverse backgrounds and languages. Painting offered a way of asserting authority: of explaining who the townspeople were and where they came from amid this chaotic mélange of strangers. Using ancient iconographies rarely seen by outsiders, a new artistic renaissance sprung forth as artists defiantly asserted themselves against the uncertainty of colonial displacement. In 1973 the group founded their own company, Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd—the first Aboriginal-owned cooperative in Australia.
Organized by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia in partnership with Papunya Tula Artists, Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu (translated as “past and present together”) will feature 134 works in its presentation at the Grey Art Museum, including a suite of fifty paintings commissioned for the 50th anniversary of Papunya Tula Artists. From early experiments by founding artists such as Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, and Uta Uta Tjangala to epic abstractions by Clifford Possum, Yukultji Napangati, and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, the exhibition brings together rarely seen works from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection alongside works from major private collections in the United States. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 280-page catalog, edited by Fred Myers and Henry Skerritt and distributed by University of Virginia Press, and an online resource.