Gertie Huddleston

 

 Gertie Huddleston (1916-2013) was an Aboriginal Australian artist from southern Arnhem Land.Huddleston's exact birth date is unclear, with sources ranging between 1916 and 1933.
"Gertie Huddleston was one of the first contemporary artists to emerge from South East Arnhem Land at Ngukurr, situated on the banks of the Roper River.
Ngukurr a place of many stones’ is today an Aboriginal community of about 800 people from nine different language groups, many of whom are displaced from their ancestral countries. Originally an early 1900s Anglican mission, Ngukurr provided a haven for the Roper River peoples fleeing the violence of pastoralists moving up from the south. People of many different clans and language groups congregated there, including the Alawa, Mara, Ngalakan, Ngandi, Nunggubuyu, Rittarrngu and Wandarang clans. This history is reflected in the subject matters and diversity of styles of the Ngukurr artists’ paintings. Ngukurr artists are famous for exploring new painting styles and techniques and recontextualising them to become something wholly unique."(aboriginalexhibitions.com.au)

 

 

 

 

Nellie Mae Rowe - American Folk Art

"Nellie Mae Rowe was a self-taught African-American artist known for her unique drawings and sculptures of the rural South. Using everyday materials, including chewing gum, markers, egg cartons, and food trays, she melded personal mythology with Christian symbolism. “I feel great being an artist. I didn't even know that I would ever become one. It is just surprising to me,” she once said. Born Nellie Mae Williams on July 4, 1900 in Fayetteville, GA, the artist grew up on her father’s sharecropping farm where she showed an early propensity for drawing and crafts. Married to her first husband Ben Wheat in 1916, she worked mostly as farm hand over the next few decades. After the death of her second husband Henry Rowe in 1948, she began devoting much of her time to creating dolls and paintings. Around this time, Rowe began setting up works in her front yard, inviting visitors to come look as she played gospel tunes on an electric organ. She was first brought to the attention of a larger audience after her inclusion in the 1976 exhibition “Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770­–1976.” Rowe died on October 18, 1982 in Vinnings, GA. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others."(artnet)

 

Australian Aboriginal Art Makinti Napanangka

Makinti Napanangka (c. 1930 – 9 January 2011) was a Pintupi-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Australia's Western Desert region. She was referred to posthumously as Kumentje.The term Kumentje was used instead of her personal name as it is customary among many indigenous communities not to refer to the deceased by their original given name for some time after their death. She lived in the communities of Haasts Bluff, Papunya, and later at Kintore, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north-east of the Lake MacDonald region where she was born, on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Makinti Napanangka began painting Contemporary Indigenous Australian art at Kintore in the mid-1990s, encouraged by a community art project. Interest in her work developed quickly, and she is now represented in most significant Australian public art galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia. A finalist in the 2003 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, Makinti won the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2008. Her work was shown in the major indigenous art exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

 Working in synthetic polymer on linen or canvas, Makinti's paintings primarily take as their subjects a rockhole site, Lupul, and an indigenous story (or "dreaming") about two sisters, known as Kungka Kutjarra. She was a member of the Papunya Tula Artists Cooperative, but her work has been described as more spontaneous than that of her fellow Papunya Tula artists.
Makinti's works, including her Clemenger Award and NATSIAA paintings, are created with synthetic polymer on linen or canvas.
Many paintings by artists of the Western Desert relate to water, while the story (or "dreaming") most frequently portrayed by Western Desert women is Kungka Kutjarra, or Two Women, concerning the travel of two sisters.Makinti's works reflect those themes, and are particularly associated with a rockhole site, Lupul, and with Kungka Kutjarra. Her untitled painting in the Genesis and Genius exhibition was based on Kungka Kutjarra, while the painting that won the 2008 Telstra award related to Lupul. The iconography of her paintings includes the use of lines representing paths and ceremonial hair-string skirts, and circles representing water-holes.

According to Art Gallery of New South Wales indigenous art curator and NATSIAA judge Hetti Perkins, Makinti and her work are "very dynamic and charismatic". Although a member of the Papunya Tula Artists, Makinti's work has been described as taking "a more spontaneous approach in illustrating the traditional iconography than that done by previous artists painting at Papunya".Her style evolved over time, beginning with gestural brush strokes in ordered compositions, and developing into more closely interwoven representations of the hair-string skirts and designs reflecting those used in body painting. Throughout this evolution, her colour palette has consistently included a subtle range of yellows and pinks, through to oranges and whites.
Judith Ryan, senior curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, described Makinti's entry in the 2003 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award as:
    concerned with touching and sensing with fingers, rather than purely visual. The repetition of colour chords and textured striations, which closely echo each other, has a rhapsodic effect akin to many bodies in dance and reveals the inner or spiritual power, the essence, of Makinti Napanangka's country and cultural identity. The energetic lines invoke body paint for women’s business, and more particularly represent spun hair-string, which is used to make belts worn by women during ceremonies associated with the rockhole site of Lupulnga, a Peewee Dreaming place.
Reviewing the same exhibition, Robert Nelson described Makinti's work as "sensual and chromatically effusive painting".The work of the "Kintore ladies" has created "some of the most richly textured surfaces in the history of the (Papunya Tula) company";Makinti's painting for Genesis and Genius was hailed as "a painterly celebration of colour and form"Wikipedia

Johnny Warangkula Jupurrula

"Johnny Warangkula Jupurrula was born in 1925 at Minjilpirri, an area north west of Illipili and south of Lake Mackay. The son of mixed parents, his mother being of Luritja/Warlpiri/Pintupi descent and his father Luritja/Warlpiri, Johnny was raised in a traditional manner, living a traditional life style in the desert and never attending European schools. Johnny is of the Luritja language group and was initiated into manhood during his family’s stay at a mission in Hermannsburg.
Johnny can recollect his first contact with Europeans, remembering his fearful response when witnessing an aircraft fly over his home lands as a young boy. His people believed the airplane to be a ‘mamu’ or devil. At a later date, his people came into contact with camels for the first time and again hid in fright as they recognized the beasts as being evil.
His painting career began after a long turn at laboring, his efforts contributing to the development of roads, airstrips and settlements in areas such as: Haasts Bluff, Mt Leibig, Yuendumu and Mt Wedge. In return for his work building roads, shoveling dirt and felling trees he was remunerated in the form of consumable goods, ‘tucker’ (as he calls it) - flour, tea, sugar, fresh vegetables and tobacco. 

Before the bulk of the Haasts Bluff population were moved to Papunya in 1960, Johnny was selected along with Nosepeg Tjuppurrula as Aboriginal representative to meet the Queen. After settling in Papunya Johnny served on the  Papunya Council with Mick Namarari, Limpi Tjapangati and Kingsley Tjungarrayi.
Geoffrey Bardon’s arrival at Papunya inspired the community to begin using art materials, Johnny rapidly developed a distinctive style of his own which came to be known as ‘overdotting’. He uses several layers of dots to depict his dreamings, which consist of Water, Fire, Yam and Egret stories. Also stories from Nyilppi and Nyalpilala - which are his father’s Dreamings. Geoffrey Bardon labelled this stylistic layering effect as ‘tremulous  illusion’ and in his book, Papunya Tula Art of the Western Desert, Bardon fondly recollects images of Johnny painting with an intense level of intuitive concentration.

From 1997 – 1999  Johnny painted this story with a new-found freedom, both in expression and in painting technique. Where he was once known for his delicate and soft white dotting, he now attacked the canvas to tell the story with great gusto. He jabbed large dots on to the surface and produced roundels and symbols for weapons with great sweeps of his arm and the brush. Red, black, white. Had he painted in France during the 1950’s he would have been labelled a ‘Taschist’.  Johnny is a significant artist who has in some sense retained an authenticity and timeless importance in his work that some of the younger painters are yet to achieve. All great painters, past and present, seem to have an additional level in their work which may defy description. This evasive quality is sometimes born of the synthesis achieved between colour, form, texture and meaning. When viewing paintings by Johnny Warangkula Jupurulla we find ourselves in a position where the recognition of another elemental level is tantalisingly close and for a lucky few the spirit is moved beyond words.  In the presence of great visual art, the employment of everyday language can become a futile and unproductive gesture.
His final years were spent at Papunya with his wife Gladys Napanangka and his eight children. Johnny’s failing eyesight worsened considerably in the last stages of life, steadily reducing his artistic output.  Johnny died on the 12th of February 2001, and will be sadly missed by all who knew him and admired his art. "( www.jintaart.com.au )