Contributors

Margo Neale

Margo Neale was until recently the Curator of Aboriginal Art at the Queensland Art Gallery. She is now Head of the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia at the National Museum of Australia.

Articles

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Emily Kame Kngwarreye: The impossible modernist

Art critic Robert Hughes made the assessment that Aboriginal art was the last great art movement of the twentieth century. It started at the Aboriginal community called Papunya, in which Aboriginal men had been painting on canvas for the outside market with great success since the 1980s. The Papunya art style, as it became known, sometimes compared to forms of Western modernism—from abstract expressionism to minimalism and even conceptual art—presented a comparison that was rarely taken literally, although some critics of the 1987 Dreamings exhibition in New York did wonder if the Aboriginal artists had been appropriating New York art. But when it came to the late paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, critics really did start to question the relationship between modernism and Western Desert painting, ascribing to her the genius and expressive freedom associated with the masters of Western modernism. 

Indigenous_Trans Cultural
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Roads cross: contemporary directions in Australian art
Curators: Vivonne Thwaites, Fiona Salmon, Anita Angel Flinders University City Gallery 29 June – 26 August 2012
Disaster & Fortitude
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Learning to be proppa : Aboriginal artists collective ProppaNOW
Senior Research Fellow and Senior Curator at the National Museum of Australia Margo Neale presents an incisive account of the genesis of proppaNOW the Queensland collective of urban Aboriginal Artists who are making waves in Australia and internationally with their intelligent brash art.
Blak on Blak
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Lin Onus
Lin Onus had a remarkable career, from motor mechanic and political activist to maker of marvellous, witty and original paintings and sculptures. He was also widely loved and respected for his compassion and willingness to lead the cause of Aboriginal advancement. 
Reconciliation: Indigenous art for the 21st Century
The Waka and the Cattle Truck
What do a traditional Maori canoe (waka) and a cattle truck have in common?...In both these cases these vehicles were conveyors of culture. These images are central to two collaborative works at the second Asia Pacific Triennial of Pacific Art at the Queensland Art Gallery.
Indigenous Arts of the Pacific
AMaGA NAVA Cementa Unley Museum