Aboriginal Art Collections

Aboriginal art collections : highlights from Australia's public museums and galleries is a survey of the indigenous collections of fourteen public museums and galleries in Australia.

Besides the 550 strong collection of the dedicated Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht (AAMU), this exhibition includes works from the Groninger Museum - which received gifts of art from the Aboriginal Arts Board in Australia in the 70s, the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam specialising in urban artists, the University Museum Groningen and the ethnographically based Nijmeegs Volkenkundig Museum. The AAMU also has access to various private collections - notably the famous Thomas Vrooms Collection. This is the first time that key works from all of these collections, which have been loaned to AAMU on a long-term basis, have been brought together in one exhibition.

This volume of original essays brings together, for the first time, histories of the making and of the makers of most of the major Indigenous Australian museum collections. These collections are a principal source of information on how Aboriginal people lived in the past. Knowing the context in which any collection was created-the intellectual frameworks within which the collectors were working, their collecting practices, what they failed to collect, and what Aboriginal people withheld-is vital to understanding how any collection relates to the Aboriginal society from which it was derived. Once made, collections have had mixed fates: some have become the jewel of a museum's holdings, while others have been divided and dispersed across the world, or retained but neglected. The essays in this volume raise issues about representation, institutional policies, the periodisation of collecting, intellectual history, material culture studies, Aboriginal culture and the idea of a 'collection'.

A fascinating look at Australian Aboriginal art over the past four decades, highlighting millennia-old artistic traditions

"This publication accompanies the exhibition Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 5 through September 18, 2016."

In recognizing the established intellectual and institutional authority of Aboriginal artists, curators, and academics working in cultural institutions and universities, this volume serves as an important primer on key questions and issues accompanying the changing representational practices of the community cultural center, the public art gallery and the anthropological museum.