Boomalli: Fact or Fantasy: you decide!

Cover of Boomalli: Fact or Fantasy: you decide!
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Unfettered actions: Sportification, playgrounds and public art
Feature
David Cross

Published 25 August 2021
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'The work that art does': Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation
Feature
Abigail Moncrieff

Published 25 August 2021
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Yours truly, The Department of Homo Affairs
Feature
Jessie Boylan

Published 25 August 2021
Riddoch
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First Nations museum memorials: Daniel Boyd and Yhonnie Scarce
Feature
Erin Vink

Published 25 August 2021
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Counter-monuments: Challenging distorted colonial histories through public art and memorials
Feature

Published 25 August 2021
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Transformative communities: Curation and care
Feature
Rayleen Forester

Published 25 August 2021
NAVA
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Blue skies, blood moon
Feature
Daniel Mudie Cunningham

Published 25 August 2021
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A close-up of Amazon Acres: Helen Grace
Feature
Fiona Kelly McGregor

Published 25 August 2021

Boomalli, founded in 1987, enters an unlikely future where anonymous benefactors help them to buy premises in an inner city suburb, to employ curators and become independent of funding bodies. Tax-free havens are set up for indigenous artists in NSW and Boomalli members exhibit regularly at MOMA in New York.

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More from this Issue Full Issue Contents

Nomad to TV star in three years: Walala Tjapaltjarri meets the world
Feature
Lotte Waters

In late 1984 Walala Tjapaltjarri and other Pintupi tribespeople walked out of the Gibson desert in WA and met Europeans for the first time. Within a few years Walala adapted his traditional ground and body painting to painting on canvas and was filmed by Robert Hughes for his TV series Beyond the Fatal Shore.

Published March 2000
Labelled - Buyer Be Aware
Feature
Brenda L Croft

The introduction of a Label of Authenticity has some problems for contemporary urban Aboriginal artists who feel once again that they are being asked to confirm their status. Another issue is that any indigenous person can apply for the Label regardless of the integrity of their art practice. Is the Label too blunt an instrument to be useful to most artists?

Published March 2000
Challenging boundaries: Indigenous Art in Three Dimensions
Feature
Doreen Mellor

Recent Indigenous 3-D work is regarded as both art and craft. The materials range from shell and rushes to scrap steel, grass, ceramic, glass and bull kelp; the works may be vessels, installations, necklaces, small figures etc. The works often contain explicit references to cultural or historical truths eg the figures by WA artist Joyce Winsley which recall characters from her youth in the country, or Lola Greeno's water containers made in the traditional way from bull kelp .

Published March 2000
New Ways With Clay: Tiwi Pottery
Feature
Margie West

The Tiwi people on Melville and Bathurst Islands just north of Darwin have a 30-year tradition of pottery. They have absorbed a range of influences from the British Michael Cardew to visiting potters from Australia or via annual workshops with a Swiss potter Claude Presset. Some pots were collaboratively done - thrown by experienced potters and decorated by local artists. Slab and coil pieces drew on artists' experience in wood carving and painting.

Published March 2000
Contemporary Voices: Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery in the SA Museum
Feature
Franchesca Cubillo

The new Aboriginal Cultures Gallery at the SA Museum has set a new standard of excellence in interpretation of historical material. The use of film, video and computer terminals carrying extensive information from songs and interviews to historical documentation adds to the rich texture of the displays. Contemporary Voices is a set of filmed interviews conducted by museum staff in the six months before the opening of the new Gallery

Published March 2000
Political Theatre in Beyond the Pale
Feature
John Kean

The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Artin 2000 was a survey of new indigenous art titled Beyond the Pale. This attempt to show the best of new work was staged as a series of rooms each with a different mood from baskets and shimmering paintings to rooms of confrontation where works invited viewers to be shocked by figures of authority seen in very unflattering mode.

Published March 2000
Charting Co-existence
Feature
Maurice O+Riordan

Mapping Our Countries was an exhibition at the short-lived Djamu Gallery in Sydney, curated by artist Judy Watson and archaeologist Dr Paul Taon. They collected objects and works of art to illustrate how
they relate to the idea of mapping land or sea. Mapping is done for a huge variety of reasons, for exploiting resources, for proving theories, for simply finding one's way.

Published March 2000
Rover Thomas
Tribute
Kim Akerman

A tribute to the Western Australian artist Rover Thomas who died in 1998 aged around 72. After a full life spent as a stockman and an important leader of ceremonial life through the Kurirr-Kurirr dance cycle in the Warmun community, in 1982 he began establishing a new mode of painting based on Kimberly rock art. His bold and original painting depicts the land and the massacres that took place there up to the 1950s. The National Gallery of Australia accorded him a retrospective exhibition Roads Cross in 1994.

Published March 2000
Polemic: From the 21st Century and Through the Telescope
Feature
Janet Maughan

Polemic: There has been a paradigm shift in Australia with the development of Aboriginal art, which may be as consequential as that of the Impressionists. Over the last 30 years Aboriginal artists have been making their voices heard and now make up at least 25% of the country's working visual artists though they are only 1.7% of the population. Their art will go down in history as providing new perspectives with which to view the world

Published March 2000
Health and Art: Can art make people (feel) well?
Feature
Felicity Wright

Art can function in a wide range of ways beyond what is normally regarded as its arena. It can empower by raising confidence, providing income which can be used to improve diet and living conditions, it can be therapeutic, liberating and provide an emotional and intellectual outlet, while posters and TV ads can convey important messages about health issues. When a culture is strong the people are healthy.

Published March 2000
Printmaking Gains Momentum
Feature
Basil Hall

The first Aboriginal prints were linocuts made in jail by Kevin Gilbert. By the late 1970s Aboriginal printmaking in collaboration with print studios had begun. The Canberra School of Art, Port Jackson Press and now Northern Editions have been catalysts for the many enthusiasts at the Yirrkala, Papunya, Tiwi, Munupi, Oenpelli, Ernabella etc communities and workshops are run in remote centres at their request. Some like Lockhart River are now setting up their own facilities.

Published March 2000
Judy Watson's etched zinc wall at Bunjilaka
Feature
Gaye Sculthorpe

Queensland artist Judy Watson spent three months in Melbourne on a commission for a zinc wall around 50 metres long for the Bunjilaka gallery at the new Museum Melbourne. Watson used motifs relating to Aboriginal material culture in the etched panels of this work.

Published March 2000
 
Guildhouse
Desart 1
Sydney Contemporary
City of Unley 2