Aboriginal Art Comes to Washington - The Georgetown Connection
Detail of work by artist Dorothy Napangardi
There are two exhibits of Aboriginal Art in Washington, DC this Fall. One at American University's Katzen Center brings together Aboriginal Art and artists in an excellent exhibit. The other, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, features 26 pieces from the collection of Ann Shumelda Okerson and Georgetown University Provost James J. O’Donnell of New Haven, Connecticut and Washington D.C.
We talked with O'Donnell about his interest in aboriginal art.
CANZ: When did you become interested in aboriginal art? What sparked your interest?
O'Donnell: We began collecting on a trip to Australia in 1997, when we saw some canvases reasonably priced in a souvenir store in Darling Harbour and bought one that tickled our fancy. It turned out to be by a fairly well-known painter, and was in fact quite good. So on next trip in 1999, we went to Alice Springs and spent a week in the galleries there, buying and falling victim to the addiction. It's a team-addiction: Ann has the eye and has been keen and successful at looking for the really successful visual achievements, while I have brought more of my historical and cultural interest to thinking about and trying to understand how these objects have made it possible for some remarkable cultural boundaries to be crossed. The paintings bear with them a lot of meaning -- not all of it accessible to non-aboriginal purchasers -- but do at least provide a way for two cultures otherwise very distant from each other in some ways to bridge a gap. We've bought mainly in Alice and surrounds, so "central desert" artists, with a couple of exceptions, and because we've been buying in the 90s and 00s, we've found women artists to preoccupy our attention largely but not exclusively. (Hence the exhibit at NMWA.) We have 26 pieces there on exhibit.
CANZ: Picking one or two specific pieces, could you explain their significance?
Detail of work by artist Walala Tjapaltjarri
O'Donnell: Ann and I could argue about which dazzle or intrigue the most. Dorothy Napangardi and Emily Kane Kngwarrye are perhaps the most famous of "our" painters, and the pieces we have of them are first-rate. Both push the bounds of traditional "dot painting", Emily perhaps more than Dorothy, and one of the things we've enjoyed watching in this decade is just how rapidly styles and conceptions are evolving as this evidently excited group of artists continue to innovate and invent and diversify, looking at other aboriginal artists and digging into their own traditions as they go. I have a fondness for our piece by Walala Tjapaltjarri, stark black and red -- too stark for Ann's taste, but his work seems to be among the most forthright and conscious statements of tradition *in the face of* challenges to that tradition. Perhaps that's a stereotypical masculine approach, while the women painters are perhaps more thoughtfully engaged with the traditions themselves and bring off their achievements without as much attention -- distraction by? -- the looming cultural presence of wealth and whiteness and modernity all around them.
