Reviews
A week after visiting Tweed Regional Gallery the image that has stayed with me is Humpback whale migrating south, (2024)—not strictly a portrait, but the entry point Worlds Around Us, the outcome of Sammy Hawker’s Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence at Tweed. The exhibition fills a darkened space off the main concourse from which each window frames a picture postcard of Wollumbin / Mount Warning. The ‘dark room’ works effectively as a companion show to the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture which celebrates 20 years in 2025.
The exhibitionary landscape for Yolŋu art from north-east Arnhem Land has been crowded of late. In 2021 Djalkiri: Yolŋu Art, Collaborations and Collections was the inaugural exhibit at the Chau Chak Wing Museum of Sydney University. Its former Macleay Museum curators have a history of co-operative and Indigenous-led curation, reinterpreting a rich group of barks from the 1940s with the Yolŋu Elder Dr Joe Gumbula. In the 1980s Djon Mundine had commissioned collections from Milingimbi and Ramingining for the affiliated Power Collection; Djalkiri crowned these curatorial approaches with an innovative display. Currently, the new-look Potter Museum of Art’s inaugural exhibition 65 000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art has a strong presentation of Yolŋu art.
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Bernard Smith's assertion in 1943, that it is "truly absurd nowadays to talk of 'modern art' as a single entity," encapsulates a sentiment that has persisted through the decades and finds resonance in Margot Osborne's exploration of Adelaide's art scene. Osborne's work, a solidly researched and expansive history, with re-printed archival material and an extensive index forming a doorstop omnibus which chronicles the critical historical events and figures who have shaped Adelaide and South Australian art.
Through a series of overview chapters by Osborne and commissioned essays by a range of experts and veterans of the local scene, (alongside anecdotes from cultural commentators including poet and publisher Max Harris, critic Robert Hughes and Stephanie Britton, founding Editor of Artlink), Osborne's encyclopedic compilation of essays illuminate what she argues is the uniqueness of Adelaide's artistic landscape between 1939 and 2000, while situating it within broader cultural and socio-political contexts of Australian and international art.
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