In 2009 eight new case displays were added to the legendary 1884 Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Indigenous art scholar and lecturer Susan Lowish examines how Aboriginal art fared in this rejig of history.
Sarah Scott reviews and questions Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route exhibition at the National Musuem of Australa. She asks: "Why don’t the NMA’s collections of Indigenous material culture feature more strongly in their exhibition program? Why are both the NMA and the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) collecting the highly sought after and expensive works produced by major Papunya artists? If the commissioning of art and associated documentary material is a priority for the NMA what other Indigenous material culture may they be neglecting?"
Curator at AAMU Georges Petitjean describes the 'Remembering Forward' exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in detail, how it came about, what surrounds it and what it might mean.
French curator Arnaud Morvan, who recently completed his Phd at the University of Melbourne on the art of the East Kimberley, writes about the new approach to showing and consulting about Indigenous art taken by the still-under construction Musée des Confluences (due to open in 2014) in Lyon. "It represents a first step towards an abolition of the segregation endured by non-Western art in Europe and an attempt to rise above the antiquated opposition between art and ethnography."
Tasmanian essayist and poet, currently working as Indigenous Visiting Research Scholar at AIATSIS in Canberra, Greg Lehman looks over David Hansen's recent award-winning essay entitled 'Seeing Truganini' and finds it wanting.
Felicity Wright speaks from long experience, as a worker and as a reviewer of art centres on Aboriginal lands. Her thoughtful article teases out many do's and don'ts in this highly contested field.