{"id":4151,"date":"2013-06-28T13:23:42","date_gmt":"2013-06-28T03:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/?p=4151"},"modified":"2013-06-28T16:24:29","modified_gmt":"2013-06-28T06:24:29","slug":"article-wally-caruana-crossing-cultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/article-wally-caruana-crossing-cultures\/","title":{"rendered":"Article: Wally Caruana @ Crossing Cultures"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Wally<\/a>

Wally Caruana delivering a speech
Photo \u00a9 Will Owen<\/p><\/div>\n

As part of the series of events related to the exhibition\u00a0Crossing Culture<\/b><\/em><\/a>\u00a0at the Toledo Museum of Art\u00a0(US), IDAIA\u00a0is sharing\u00a0the well informative article\u00a0written by Will Owen reporting on Wally Caruana\u2019s lecture on \u201cThe Emergence of Aboriginal Australian Art in the Public Domain\u201d. If Aboriginal artists\u00a0have been\u00a0largely presented\u00a0across the old continent, the United States (and more globally North America, with\u00a0exhibition\u00a0S\u00e0kahan<\/b><\/em><\/a>\u00a0at the National Gallery of Canada)\u00a0have seen a significant increase in their presence in institutional exhibitions.\u00a0Will Owen interrogates\u00a0how\u00a0the interest in Aboriginal art in the United States\u00a0can be maintained.<\/p>\n

Talk by Wally Caruana \u2013 Crossing Cultures<\/b><\/p>\n

by Will Owen, 16 June 2013<\/p>\n

\u201cLast weekend we were again in Toledo, Ohio, for a series of events related to Crossing Cultures<\/i>.\u00a0 The Toledo Museum of Art is now led by Brian Kennedy, formerly the Director at the NGA from 1997 to 2004 and afterwards Director of the Hood Museum of Art from 2005 to 2010.\u00a0 When Brian arrived in Canberra, Wally Caruana was the Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art.\u00a0 Wally was then about to launch the landmark exhibition Painters of the Wagilag Sisters Story<\/i>.\u00a0 That exhibition served as Brian\u2019s introduction, up close and personal, to the world of Aboriginal art, for the gallery was filled with a dozen senior men from Arnhem Land who had come to help prepare for the exhibition\u2019s opening.<\/p>\n

The two NGA veterans met again this weekend, along with Katie Russell, the Head of Learning and Access at the National Gallery.\u00a0 Wally gave a lecture on Thursday night on \u201cThe Emergence of Aboriginal Australian Art in the Public Domain.\u201d\u00a0 The hour-long talk traced the engagement of white Australia with varied manifestations of Aboriginal art, beginning with the early collecting efforts of researchers like Baldwin Spencer, who took an interest in the paintings he saw in caves and on bark shelters during his travels through northern Australia in the second decade of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

From that starting point, Wally examined the presentation of art\u2014and the persistent tension between the work as fine art or as ethnographic artifact\u2014over the succeeding decades of exhibitions and collecting.\u00a0 The overall structure of his talk was geographic: after examining the early interest in bark painting and proceeding through the changes in the genre over time as dialogue between the cultures matured, Wally turned his attention to the development of acrylic painting in the deserts.<\/p>\n

Here his focus was again historical as he presented correlations between traditional ritual arts and the origins of the acrylic movement at Papunya with the transformations that have taken place in the decades since Geoffrey Bardon encouraged and facilitated the presentation of traditional iconography on permanent and portable material.<\/p>\n

From there Wally took us to the Kimberley and the changes that were wrought in the wake of Cyclone Tracy.\u00a0 He drew out the implications of the storm\u2019s devastation for the proper maintenance of Aboriginal culture as they were manifested in Rover Thomas\u2019s revelatory dreams, recounted the beginnings of ochre painting on board that supported the Kurrir Kurrir ceremonies, and traced the subsequent development of the East Kimberley school of painting.<\/p>\n

Finally, his lecture brought into focus the art created in the population centers where the vast majority of Aboriginal people live: the so-called Boomerang Coast that stretches from Adelaide to Brisbane.\u00a0 He selected Richard Bell as an exemplar of the urban artist who challenges notions of Aboriginal identity and the creation of Aboriginal art for white audience.\u00a0 There was a nod to Brian Kennedy here as well, for Brian was one of the judges of the 2003 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award who awarded Bell\u2019s Scientia e Metaphysica (Bell\u2019s Theorem)<\/i> top honors that year\u201d… [Read more]<\/a><\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

\"exhibition<\/a>

exhibition Crossing Cultures<\/i> at The Toledo Museum of Art (USA)
Photo \u00a9 Will Owen<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of the series of events related to the exhibition Crossing Culture at the Toledo Museum of Art, IDAIA wants to communicate the well informative article by writer and blogger Will Owen. If Aboriginal artists are currently on stage through the old continent, the United States (and more globally North America with the exhibition S\u00e0kahan at the National Gallery of Canada) are according a prominent place to them. Will Owen reports the lecture of Wally Caruana on \u201cThe Emergence of Aboriginal Australian Art in the Public Domain\u201d and interrogates us how we can maintain the interest in Aboriginal art in the United States? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[91,832,143,524,517,540,253],"class_list":["post-4151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-releases","tag-91","tag-aboriginal-art","tag-crossing-cultures","tag-latest-release","tag-sakahan","tag-wally-caruana","tag-will-owen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4151"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4155,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151\/revisions\/4155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idaia.com.au\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}