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.

"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."

Featuring over 240 colour plates, this volume canvasses an extraordinary diverse range of Aboriginal art. The 27 essays by leading authorities and 13 interviews with key artists are accompanied by an extensive chronology.

This book is an investigation of the way the Aboriginal art phenomenon has been entangled with Australian society’s negotiation of Indigenous people’s status within the nation. Through critical reflection on Aboriginal art’s idiosyncrasies as a fine arts movement, its vexed relationship with money, and its mediation of the politics of identity and recognition, this study illuminates the mutability of Aboriginal art’s meanings in different settings. It reveals that this mutability is a consequence of the fact that a range of governmental, activist and civil society projects have appropriated the art’s vitality and metonymic power in national public culture, and that Aboriginal art is as much a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture as it is an art movement. Throughout these examinations, Fisher traces the utopian and dystopian currents of thought that have crystallised around the Aboriginal art movement and which manifest the ethical conundrums that underpin the settler state condition.

This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners to take stock of the frictions generated by a tumultuous time in the Australian art field and to probe what the crises might mean for the future of the arts in Australia. Specific topics include national and international art markets; art practices in their broader social and political contexts; social relations and institutions and their role in contemporary Australian art; the policy regimes and funding programmes of Australian governments; and national and international art markets. In addition, the collection will pay detailed attention to the field of indigenous art and the work of Indigenous artists. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, art history, cultural studies, and Indigenous peoples.

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.

The archive is a source of power. It takes control of the past, deciding which voices will be heard and which won't, how they will be heard and for what purposes. Indigenous archivists were at work well before the European Enlightenment arrived and began its own archiving. Sometimes at odds, other times not, these two ways of ordering the world have each learned from, and engaged with, the other. Colonialism has been a struggle over archives and its processes as much as anything else.The eighteen essays by twenty authors investigate different aspects of this struggle in Australia, from traditional Indigenous archives and their developments in recent times to the deconstruction of European archives by contemporary artists as acts of cultural empowerment. It also examines the use of archives developed for other reasons, such as the use of rainfall records to interpret early Papunya paintings. Indigenous Archives is the first overview of archival research in the production and understanding of Indigenous culture. Wide-ranging in its scope, it reveals the lively state of research into Indigenous histories and culture in Australia.

Presenting the work of artists from every state and territory, the work in this catalogue demonstrates the extraordinary range of contemporary Indigenous art practice. The largest survey show of Indigenous art at the NGA in more than fifteen years, the Triennial featured up to four works by each artist created in a variety of media, including painting on bark and canvas, sculpture, textiles, weaving, new media, photomedia, printmaking and installation.

A very comprehensive look at Aboriginal art from traditional to contemporary art. Lively discussion and beautiful presentation.

An updated and expanded edition of this classic survey, which has established itself as the superlative introduction to the full diversity of Aboriginal art.