Dina Ibrahim looks at the Joe Rootsey Retrospective curated by Bruce McLean at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2010 to find an artist who in his short life achieved compelling evocations of his relationship to country.
John Barbour (1954-2011), a complex, intelligent and much loved South Australian artist and academic, was in the prime of his life and at the height of his career when he died on Sunday 17 April 2011.
Curator and artist Brenda Croft gets experiential in telling about Australia Day, her latest exhibition Stop (the) gap and what is shared by indigenous people around the globe.
As leaders of unique working partnerships between the Indigenous art industry and the Queensland Government, pioneers like Judy Watson, Dennis Nona, Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell and Sally Gabori have established strong international reputations.
The Queensland State Library Executive Manager of Indigenous research and projects Tom Mosby writes about the Margaret Lawrie Works on Paper Collection and the role of art in the lives of Torres Strait Islanders. Between July and October 2011, the watercolours in the Margaret Lawrie Works on Paper Collection will, for the first time, be exhibited together as part of 'Strait Home' at the State Library of Queensland.
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."