Good Medicine

Being Aboriginal doesn’t make you wise, spiritual or even good at art. Being Aboriginal is historical just like being any other nationality or ethnicity. All art can be examined ethnographically, all people can be examined ethnographically.

Published June 2013

Disquiet and resistance in the art of Julie Gough

Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria Judith Ryan surveys the complex and inventive art practice of Julie Gough who is concerned with "developing a visual language to engage with the unsettling space between conflicting and subsumed Australian histories."

Published June 2013

The limits of cricicism

Anthropologist John Carty casts his eyes over the last ten years of writing on Desert art, mostly in newspapers, and finds many cliches and inconsistencies. He asks:
"Where are the fine-grained localised art histories, the rich biographies of our most interesting and important individual artists? Where are their voices?" And replies: "They are still waiting in the Desert."

Published June 2013

Pamela Anne Johnston Dahl-Helm (1947-2013)

Pam was a proud Bundjalung woman. An artist, mother, grandmother, sister and friend to many, a long-term resident of Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, she was a true leftie, advocating for social justice, equality and the rights of minority groups.

Published June 2013

Louise Bourgeois: Late Works

Curator: Jason Smith
Heide Museum of Modern Art
21 November 2012 – 11 March 2013

Published June 2013

Jimmy Pike: there is more

Curator and writer Karen Dayman fills in the background of the development of the work and broadens the profile of Great Sandy Desert artist Jimmy Pike whose skills took him around the world and into collaborations with Desert Designs, with his partner Pat Lowe and with the theatre.

Published June 2013

Gulumbu Yunupingu (1943-2012)

People in Nhulunbuy still talk wonderingly about the last days of Gulumbu Yunupingu’s life. Something happened. Something changed. For nine days the monolithic concrete hospital in the sterile mining town threw open its doors and for nine days the Yolngu ceremony ground flowed in.

Published June 2013

Mouths and Meaning Bronwyn Platten, Sarah Coggrave and others

Australian Experimental Art Foundation Adelaide
1 February – 2 March 2013

Published June 2013

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn: The Beautiful as Force

Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney
7–31 March 2013

Published June 2013

Thancoupie/Thanakupi (1937-2011)

Thancoupie (aka Dr Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher James AO) was a trailblazer in Aboriginal art, studying, showing and making work in ceramics for many years. Her work was shown nationally and internationally. After many years she returned home to Weipa, and while still making and exhibiting, focused much of her attention on her family, community, land rights and the next generations.

Published June 2013

The archive in the contemporary

The artworks of Danie Mellor, Brian Robinson and Christian Thompson each draw on archival material for subject matter, for inspiration, and to develop new work that harks back and forward at the same time.

Published June 2013

Exhibitions to watch

Published June 2013