Aboriginal Art in the US

Exhibitions

Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, IN

Richard Bell: Uz Vs. Them
March 2 – May 5, 2013

Activist. Painter. Provocateur. Filmmaker. These words characterize Australian artist Richard Bell, whose one-person exhibition Richard Bell: Uz vs. Them will be on display in the IU Art Museum’s Special Exhibitions Gallery. Bell works primarily as a painter, but he also creates photographs, films, and installation pieces; all of these mediums are represented in the exhibition. While his painting style has affinities with Aboriginal desert painting, the use of letters and texts, popular imagery, irony, appropriation, and direct references to the work of Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein clearly embed Bell’s work in the Western art world mainstream.
Bell’s first U.S. exhibition was in 2009 in New York, but Uz vs. Them is the first traveling show featuring his work exclusively. The exhibition has been traveling since 2011, opening at Tufts University Art Gallery and then moving to the University of Kentucky Art Museum and the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver. The showing at Indiana University is the final venue for the exhibition.

Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH

Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art from the Hood Museum of Art
April 12 – July 15, 2013

Crossing Cultures explores more than 100 works of contemporary Indigenous art from Australia spanning five decades by artists from desert communities as well as major metropolitan centers. Will Owen and Harvey Wagner collected the objects and donated them to the Hood Museum of Art. Among artists represented are Michael Riley, Shorty Jangala Robertson, Danny Gibson Tjapaltjarri, Destiny Deacon and Walangkura Napanangka. Curated by Stephen Gilchrist, curator of Indigenous Australian art at the Hood Museum of Art, the exhibition encompasses the broad range of media and materials employed by contemporary Aboriginal artists, from acrylic painting on canvas to earthen ochre painting on bark, as well as sculpture and photography, among other media.

Events

There are no events at this time.

Resources

Aboriginal Art & Culture: An American Eye
Readings, reviews, and reflections by an American observer of Australian Indigenous art, culture, politics, anthropology, music, and literature.

in transition: Kimberly A. Christen’s blog
Kim Christen is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies and Director of Digital Projects at the Plateau Center for American Indian Studies at Washington State University. She worked in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia over the last decade with Warumungu community members on a range of projects including a book, an interactive website, and a community archive.

The Kelton Foundation
Founded in 1983, the Kelton Foundation promotes the stewardship, enhancement and understanding of art, maritime history and man’s relationship with the sea through its collections of maritime art, navigational instruments, China Trade art and objects, Pacific ethnographic materials, Australian Aboriginal art and other fine and ethnographic art related to these fields.

National Geographic – All Road’s Film Project
The All Roads Film Project is a National Geographic program dedicated to providing a platform for indigenous and underrepresented minority-culture storytellers around the world to showcase their works to promote knowledge, dialogue, and understanding with a broader, global audience.

Womba World: Angelina Hurley’s blog
Womba (an Australian Aboriginal word for crazy, mad, insane) World is simply a commentary on the world through the eyes of an Australian Aboriginal woman. An Indigenous point of view. Indigenous people view and relate to the world differently; in a unique and humorous way. This is my life.

The only museum in the United States dedicated to the exhibition and study of Australian Aboriginal Art