Snapshot of a Culture

Cover of Snapshot of a Culture
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Risky business: Engaging adolescents at the Art Gallery of South Australia
Feature
Kylie Neagle

Published 01 September 2019
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MCAD Manila: Learning, sharing and conversation
Feature
Joselina Cruz and Paula Acuin

Published 01 September 2019
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Museum MACAN: Critical conversations through art
Feature
Aaron Seeto

Published 01 September 2019
Desert Mob
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Falling in love (Or is the curatorial a methodology?)
Feature
Tara McDowell

Published 01 September 2019
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Being an artist and an art teacher
Feature
Henry Ward

Published 01 September 2019
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Trying to be at home in the world: New parameters for art education
Feature
Gert Biesta

Published 01 September 2019
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Choose your own immersion: Art schools as a site of creative becoming
Feature
Una Rey

Published 01 September 2019
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Vanishing into action: Art beyond the contemporary
Feature
Alasdair Foster

Published 01 September 2019

A conference about Indigenous arts and crafts was held in 1999 and was a useful sounding board for issues from the new Label of Authenticity and copyright, to the new Goods and Services Tax and art in cyberspace.

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More from this Issue Full Issue Contents

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
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
George Milpurrurru and David Malangi
Tribute
Michael O+Ferrall

Tributes to two painters from Ramingining in Arnhem Land, George Milpurrurru and David Malangi who helped to place this region on the map. Paintings were included in the 1979 Sydney Biennale. The iconography, style of painting and the public response to their work and interaction with the wider art world is discussed. Both of these major artists died during the 1990s after careers of around four decades.

Published March 2000
Photography with Intent
Feature
Gary Lee

Various indigenous artists began to use photography to express ideas about their social and political position in the 1980s; the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations were a strong catalyst. Formerly they were always on the other side of the lens, as anthropological subjects. The exception was Mervyn Bishop, employed as a press photographer in the 1960s, and pioneer in the medium and role model for younger artists including Fiona Foley, Ricky Maynard, Peter McKenzie.

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
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
Y.Y. Gibson Tjungurrayi
Tribute
Richard (Dick) Kimber

A tribute to the Pintupi painter Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi born c.1928 in the region of Kintore and died in 1998. He was a strongly traditional man and after migrating to Papunya he was encouraged by Geoff Bardon to take up painting. His works, mainly the Tingari stories to do with the ceremonial stories of ancestral men, were acquired by collections in Australia and internationally.

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
Good Brother Working with our Kids
Feature
Tjalaminu Mia

Ron Gidgup was the first Aboriginal fashion designer in WA. Since getting the Aboriginal of the Year Award in 1997 he began to turn his skills towards helping Aboriginal youth in crisis. He runs workshops in textile and clothing design and brought many young people back from the brink of death from substance abuse. He has worked in urban and rural settings, with schools and other groups.

Published March 2000
Black Glory: Erotica Old and New
Feature
Gary Lee

The exhibition 'Love Magic' explored Aboriginal male erotica and reveals a little-known dimension in traditional spirituality which has been echoed by contemporary artists. Images of phalluses, couples embracing and testicles going walkabout refer to legends and stories of the Old People. This very large exhibition was a life-affirming spectacle with humour and poignancy as well as some powerful eroticism.

Published March 2000
Emily Kame Kngwarray
Tribute
Jenny Green

A tribute to Emily Kame Kngwarray the celebrated painter from Sandover near the central desert community of Utopia, who died in 1996 after a meteoric career during which she produced 3,000 works in 8 years. Although her concern was to paint and thus protect her country (her main subject was the pencil yam after the seeds and flowers of which - kam - she was named) she was acclaimed by some as a major abstract painter of the 20th century. She won a major creative fellowship and was posthumously shown at the Venice Biennale.

Published March 2000
Art in Warmun community
Feature
Susan Hartley

A new art centre at Warmun in the Kimberly of WA is a showcase for the talents of the artists of the area, some of whom used to work on big pastoral stations in this remote area. Celebrated founders of the centre were Rover Thomas and Queenie Mckenzie. There are tensions between their interests and those of white landowners in relation to access to 'country' being denied. Young people are unable to have a traditional education and are becoming westernised through videos.

Published March 2000
 
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