Ben McKeown: Sunshine and Lollipops

Melbourne-based Ben McKeown was the overall winner of the 2011 Victorian Indigenous Art Award with a mysterious photograph called Untitled of an Aboriginal man concealing hinself behind two heavy boomernags. McKeown's artwork is inspired by a quest for belonging, by the genealogical researches of the anthropologist Norman Tindale, by the city and the suburbs.

Published June 2011

Tracey Moffatt / Stop(the)Gap /
tall man

Tracey Moffatt: Narratives
Curators: Stephen Zagala, Maria Zagala
Art Gallery of South Australia
26 February - 20 March 2011

Stop (the) Gap: International Indigenous art in motion
Curator: Brenda Croft
Samstag Museum of Art
24 February - 21 April 2011

Vernon Ah Kee: tall man
Australian Experimental Art Foundation
23 February - 26 March 2011

Published June 2011

Romantic Landscapes

Laura Fisher worked for three years on indigenous artists' biographies for the DAAO (Dictionary of Australian Artists Online) and is now completing a doctoral thesis on the indigenous art market at the University of NSW. Here she brings her wide knowledge to bear on representational and romantic landcape paintings by indigenous artists.

Published June 2011

Elcho Island: Morning Star over London

Artlink's UK contributing editor Jo Higgins interviewed Melbourne-born London gallerist Rebecca Hossack about her Indigenous art program and her attempts to raise its profile in London. She has two galleries and each summer for three months both galleries show only Australian Indigenous art in her Songlines series. Recently Elcho Island art featured.

Published June 2011

Aboriginal art at the Vatican

The National Museum of Australia's Margo Neale writes in depth about the curation of a 100 year old collection of Aboriginal art at the Vatican in Rome. She asks: "How do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, previously captive to the anthropological gaze and to unequal power relations, not only interrogate the histories that defined them as ‘other’ and ‘lesser’, but also regain their voice and agency over historic cultural objects that reside in collections around the world?"

Published June 2011

Where the Dust Settles

Published June 2011

Space Antics: Sue Henderson, David Marsden, Penny Mason

Burnie Regional Art Gallery
19 March - 8 May 2011

Published June 2011

New displays at Pitt Rivers Museum

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.

Published June 2011

Donning Oxford

Christian Thompson who is one of the two inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholars at Oxford University writes about this experience and how it makes him think of his upbringing and the responsibility it entails. "...it is our arrival at Oxford that reminds me of how much work we still have ahead of us as young Aboriginal people and future leaders of our communities. This is something you feel as an inherent responsibility when you meet people daily from all around the world, whose communities are facing similar hardships and the symptoms of the ravages of colonisation; time is of the essence."

Published June 2011

Alive and Kicking

This issue is subtitled ‘beauty and terror’; let me explain.

I often think of the natural environment of the continent as a metaphor that mirrors the history of colonisation; a kind of infinite pathetic fallacy redoubling on itself.

Published June 2011

New Exhibitions Projects Initiatives

Published June 2011

Blandowski's Illustrated Encyclopaedia

Freelance curator, honorary associate of Museum Victoria and Blandowski-ite from way back John Kean analyses this prickly Prussian polymath's Illustrated Encyclopedia on Australia at last brought together and to light by the efforts of New Zealander Harry Allen. The book includes contributions by Mark Dugagrist, Brook Andrew, Luise Hercus and Thomas A. Darragh.

Published June 2011