Wild Yam Dreaming
Aboriginals Painting Country
Pamela McClusky
Curator of African and Oceanic Art
Seattle Art Museum
Presented by the Penn Humanities
Forum and University of Pennsylvania Museum
Free. Public invited.
Aboriginal communities in Australia
continue the oldest ongoing artistic tradition on
earth, producing what art critic Robert Hughes has
called the "last great art movement of the 20th
century." Contemporary aboriginal works resemble
nothing so much as modern abstractionist painting.
Yet what looks like abstraction is actually filled
with exacting representation of daily existence and
sacred meaning. Since such references are not obvious
to outsiders, each painting is decoded through documentation.
Seattle Art Museum Curator Pamela McClusky describes
the unique visual-verbal interplay in Australian aboriginal
art.
Dr. Peggy Sanday, Penn Museum Consulting Curator and
curator of the Museum's 2004-05 popular exhibition
"Track of the Rainbow Serpent: Australian Aboriginal
Paintings of the Wolfe Creek Crater," will introduce
the speaker. A selection of paintings from
"Rainbow Serpent," and a short video from
that show, will be on view before and after the talk.
Image in poster
from Red Rock (Ngaimangaima)" by Daisy Kungah
from Billiluna, commissioned in 2002. Photo: University
of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Reproduction prohibited in any
form without permission.
|
|
Suggested Reading
Aboriginal
Art: Unveiling the Unknown, The Sydney Morning
Herald, Nov. 20, 2003.
Indigenous
Australians, Wikipedia.
Aboriginal
Art Online.
Track
of the Rainbow Serpent, Australian Aboriginal Paintings
of the Wolfe Creek Crater, Penn Museum Exhibition Oct'04
- Mar'05.
|
