Contemporary Aboriginal Art

"A lavishly illustrated survey of Aboriginal art and the regions it is produced around Australia including Central and Western Deserts; The Kimberley and West; Top End and Arnhem Land; Queensland; Torres Strait Islands; Tasmania and southern states."--Provided by publisher.

A glorious illustrated guide to Australia's 20 major art producing communities, prefaced by a description of each region and a history of the development of Aboriginal art over the last 27 years.

Catalogue of an exhibition originally held in the First People's Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, curated by Gerald McMaster.

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, grade: 1.2, University of Kaiserslautern, language: English, abstract: Politics of Space ́s idea is to present a body of work that address some of the key questions that have held my attention over several years in relation to the nature and peculiar concerns of contemporary non-Western art, especially on how Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art is perceived, received and read in significant parts of the public where cross-cultural exchange occurs. Significant areas of research in relation to Contemporary Indigenous Art are not only certain institutions within the art world such as art centres, art galleries and museums but also public areas like universities, government bureaus and particularly touristic institutions, as a vast majority of non-indigenous people experience non-Western art in this context only.

This book aims to redefine Australia’s earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category "Aboriginal art," tracing the term’s use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of "Aboriginal art" developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal/European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomena of Aboriginal art.

The author explores the differing art styles of about twenty land-based Australian communities in Arnhem Land, the Central Desert, and the Kimberley, as well as developments among urban-based artists.

This publication brings together existing research as well as new data to show how Arnhem Land bark painting was critical in the making of Indigenous Australian contemporary art and the self-determination agendas of Indigenous Australians. It identifies how, when and what the shifts in the reception of the art were, especially as they occurred within institutional exhibition displays. Despite key studies already being published on the reception of Aboriginal art in this area, the overall process is not well known or always considered, while the focus has tended to be placed on Western Desert acrylic paintings. This text, however represents a refocus, and addresses this more fully by integrating Arnhem Land bark painting into the contemporary history of Aboriginal art. The trajectory moves from its understanding as a form of ethnographic art, to seeing it as conceptual art and appreciating it for its cultural agency and contemporaneity.