New Hood exhibit will display Australian Aboriginal art
“Crossing Cultures,” an Australian Aboriginal art exhibit featuring works from 15 Aboriginal communities, will open at the Hood Museum on Sept. 15.
By Matthew Mc Nierney, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Tuesday, July 31, 2012
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“Crossing Cultures,” an exhibition of Aboriginal Australian art from the Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art that was recently gifted to the Hood Museum of Art, will open at Dartmouth on Sept. 15.
The exhibition will feature works made by members of the Aboriginal communities from 15 different parts of Australia, ranging from the remote desert to the urban center of Sydney, according to exhibition curator Stephen Gilchrist, who is also the Hood’s curator of indigenous Australian art.
In 2006, the Hood displayed artwork by indigenous Australian women in an exhibit titled “Dreaming Their Way,” Gilchrist said.
The 2006 exhibition, as well as the recent exhibition of Native American art that was featured at the Hood this past winter, showed that there is a “community receptiveness” to indigenous art at Dartmouth, likely stemming from the “very present and alive” Native American culture on campus, he said.
The success of the “Dreaming Their Way” exhibition prompted Will Owen and Harvey Wagner to donate their collection — which is one of the largest collections of Aboriginal art in the world — to the museum, according to Gilchrist.
“They were really impressed with how the works were incorporated into the curriculum,” he said. “What the Hood was doing really excited the two collectors, so they decided to gift the collection.”
Even though the term Aboriginal conjures up images of native civilizations long extinct for some, all of the artwork that is featured in the exhibition was made after 2000 by artists who are still living today, according to Gilchrist.
The themes of the artwork, however, are often related to stories and wisdom passed down through oral tradition in Aboriginal communities.
“They are drawing on a rich cultural tradition that stretches back 50,000 years, but this ancient knowledge is remade anew in these paintings,” he said.
The artworks themselves are diverse across geographical regions, with the works coming from urban settings often using photography and the works from more rural regions using paints made from natural materials or drawings, according to Gilchrist. The works, however, often share similar themes of cultural heritage and living off the land.
“They differ in terms of presentation, but not necessarily in the understanding of how they grew up culturally,” Gilchrist said.
Gilchrist said he started working on the exhibition over a year ago when he began discussions with Hood Museum Director Michael Taylor about how to best present the works included in the Owen and Wagner collection.
Over the past year, Gilchrist said he has been designing the exhibit and its catalogue and working on creating a checklist of which works to show out of the 400 that have been gifted.
“A year is a short amount of time for a museum,” he said.
Gilchrist also worked on the exhibit with Dartmouth undergraduates who took his class on Aboriginal art and curation in the Winter term, according to class member Jason Curley ’13.
While the class was a general introduction to indigenous Australian art and how to properly present art in a museum setting, the students had the opportunity to discuss how best to organize the artwork for the exhibition and were each responsible for drafting the accompanying text for two of the paintings, Curley said.
The texts that the students wrote are intended to properly contextualize the works of art by outlining the artists’ backgrounds, their source materials and, if the artist is trying to make an argument, what that argument is and whether the argument is valid, according to Curley.
Proper exhibition design is essential to effectively presenting the Aboriginal art, because the placement of a work of art and the text that accompanies it help shape a viewer’s opinion of the piece, Curley said.
Even the position of a piece of art relative to other works of a similar theme can make an argument about that work, especially in the case of Aboriginal art which often deals with the historical conflicts between native Australians and colonial powers, he said.
“It tells a lot about whose story the curator or the designer wants people to know,” he said. “Is it the majority story — in this case the oppressors — or the minority story, the ones who are being oppressed?”
Curley said that he would “highly recommend” the exhibition to Dartmouth undergraduates, because it complements the recent Native American exhibition at the museum by presenting indigenous populations in a different context.
“If [students] look at it correctly, they will realize that even though some of these pieces use traditional methods, they are important in their value to the world today,” Curley said.
The exhibition will run through March 10.