Thancoupie - Australian Art

 

 Dr Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher James  (1937-2011) was an Australian sculptural artist, educator, linguist and elder of the Thainakuith people in Weipa, in the Western Cape York area of far north Queensland. She was the last fluent speaker of the Thainakuith language and became a pillar of cultural knowledge in her community. She was also known as Thankupi, Thancoupie and Thanakupi.
"Thanakupi as she was best known, was born in the small mission town of Napranum, near Weipa where she experienced a traditional childhood of hunting and travelling with her family in time with the seasons. As part of her upbringing, her female elders taught her traditional stories and symbols that they drew in the sand. It was these symbols and stories that Thancoupie would later modify for her work in textiles and clay.
In 1971, Thancoupie travelled to Sydney to enrol in a graphic arts course at East Sydney Technical College. Here, after overcoming initial qualms associated with the sacred nature of clay in her homeland, she began her training under the guidance of Peter Rushforth, Bernard Sahm, Shiga Shigeo, Joan Grounds and Peter Travis. She became the first Indigenous person to study ceramics at a tertiary level.Thancoupie held her first solo exhibition in the backyard of her friend, Jennifer Isaacs, and through this received an invitation in 1983 to attend an international ceramics conference in Mexico. In 2001, eighty works spanning her entire career were presented in a survey exhibition at the Brisbane City Gallery and she is represented in the collections of the Powerhouse Museum, the National Gallery of Australia as well as State art galleries and museums in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria.In addition to continuing her art practice, Thancoupie spent much of the last 30 years mentoring aspiring artists from communities in Far North Queensland, Arnhemland, the Desert and the Tiwi Islands as well as holding art and professional development courses for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Thancoupie helped to found the Weipa Festival on Cape York and ran holiday programs to teach bush knowledge and art to younger generations. As a community elder Thancoupie educated Indigenous children in their traditional culture and ran art education programs during school holidays.
As recently noted by Adrian Newstead, Thancoupie’s creative and philosophical motivation is best expressed in her own words.
You are here in a lifetime to help, to understand… that is intelligence. And only intelligent people have strong friendships. I wish we all have that."(maas.museum)

 

Dorothy Napangardi - Indigenous Australian artist

Dorothy Napangardi (1950 – 2013) was a Warlpiri speaking contemporary Indigenous Australian artist born in the Tanami Desert and who worked in Alice Springs.
One of the leading artists of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement, Napangardi’s work is highly sought after by both collectors and curators worldwide. Her paintings and prints have been widely exhibited and are in all national collections within Australia and in major collections worldwide including most recently the MET, New York. Napangardi had the honour of being the 2nd indigenous artist to be given a solo survey exhibition at the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), Sydney
Discussing the artist's work, expert Christine Nicholls wrote that
"Dorothy Napangardi’s success as an artist lies in her ability to evoke a strong sense of movement on her canvases, an effect she achieves because of her remarkable spatial sense and compositional ability... Her work can be appreciated on multiple levels", though indigenous commentators tend to see painting as "a stage for human activity, rather than seeing the geometric aspects of the work."

Yannima Tommy Watson

Yannima Tommy Watson known as Tommy Watson (born 1930) is an Indigenous Australian artist, of the Pitjantjatjara people from Australia’s central western desert. He has been described by one critic as "the greatest living painter of the Western Desert"Tommy Yannima Pikarli Watson is a senior Pitjantjatara elder and Law man of Karima skin group. He was born around 1935 in Anumarapiti, 75 kilometers west of Irrunytju, also known as Wingellina, in Western Australia, near the junction of its border with the Northern Territory and South Australia. His given names of Yannima and Pikarli relate to specific sites near Anumarapiti.

 Watson's mother died during his infancy, and his father when he was about eight years old. He subsequently went to live with his father's brother, who himself died two years later. Tommy was then adopted by Nicodemus Watson, his father's first cousin. It was at this point that he went to live at Ernabella Mission, and adopted the surname Watson in addition to his Aboriginal birth name, thus becoming Tommy Yannima Pikarli Watson.
Nicodemus Watson became a strong father figure. Together they traveled widely, and Watson learned the traditional skills required to lead a nomadic existence in the desert, including the fashioning of tools and weapons from trees using burning coals, how and what to hunt, and how and where to find water. Under Nicodemus Watson's guidance, Watson learned about nature and his people's ancestral stories, collectively known to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia as Tjukurrpa.

 Tommy Watson is known for his use of strong vibrant colours, that symbolically represent the ancestral stories of his country. Judith Ryan, Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, has described Watson's colour as "incandescent". Watson's understanding of Australia's physical environment and its relationship with the ancestral stories have come to form the central element of his paintings. Watson creates his works on premium Belgian linen and favours Ara Acrylic paint, created by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Tommy has been associated with the 'Colour Power' movement that developed within the Indigenous art scene between 1984 and 2004.
Watson himself has stated that his art is an exploration of traditional Aboriginal culture, in which the land and spirituality are intertwined and communicated through stories passed on from generation to generation. He said, "I want to paint these stories so that others can learn and understand about our culture and country.Wikipedia

Josepha Petrick Kemarre

Josepha Petrick Kemarre (born ca. 1945 or ca. 1953, date uncertain) is an Anmatyerre-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Central Australia. Since first taking up painting around 1990, her works of contemporary Indigenous Australian art have been acquired by several major collections including Artbank and the National Gallery of Victoria. Her paintings portray bush plum "dreaming" and women’s ceremonies (known as Awelye). One of her paintings sold at a charity auction for A$22,800. Josepha Petrick's works are strongly coloured and formalist in composition and regularly appear at commercial art auctions in Australia. Her art appears to have survived the huge contraction of the primary art market in Australia since 2008. There is no existing Catalogue raisonné of Josepha Petrick's artworks, to date, no fakes have been cited.Josepha Petrick Kemarre is an Anmatyerre-speaking Indigenous Australian, born around 1945 or 1953 at the Santa Teresa Mission, near Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory.

 When Josepha Petrick began painting for Mbantua Gallery in central Australia, she indicated that her name was Josepha rather than Josie, and that this was how she henceforth wished to be known; however Mbantua's biography is the only source that has used that version of her name.
After marrying Robin Petyarre, brother of artist Gloria Petyarre, Josepha Petrick moved to the region of Utopia, north-east of Alice Springs, which is where she was living when she began painting around 1990.They had seven children, one of whom, Damien Petrick, went on to become an artist like his mother. By 2008, Josie Petrick's husband had died, and Petrick was dividing her time between Alice Springs and Harts Range, to its north-east

Josepha Petrick began painting about 1990 or 1992 as part of the contemporary Indigenous art movement that had begun at Papunya in the 1970s. By 1998 her work was being collected by both private and public institutions, such as Charles Sturt University, and in 2005 a work was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria. Her career received a significant boost when her work was included in the National Gallery of Victoria's 2006 Landmarks exhibition and its catalogue; her painting was printed opposite that of Yannima Tommy Watson, who was by this time famous, particularly for his contribution to the design of a new building for the Musée du quai Branly. Petrick's paintings have been included at exhibitions in several private galleries in Melbourne and Hong Kong, as well as at the Australian embassy in Washington in 2001.In 2006 a commissioned work by Petrick was exhibited at Shalom College at the University of New South Wales as part of a charity fundraising exhibition. It sold for A$22,000. As of the end of 2008, the highest recorded auction price for an item of Petrick's work was $22,800, set in May 2007. An image based on a triptych by Petrick, Bush Berries, appears on the cover of a book on the visual perception of motion, Motion Vision.Wikipedia