Looking at today's Aboriginal art

Fiona Foley, Australian artist

An Aboriginal artist dedicated to telling the history of her people will be at U.Va. next week and give a public lecture Feb. 15 at 5:30 p.m. Fiona Foley, whose ancestors, the Badtjala, were almost wiped out by colonizing Europeans, will speak about contemporary Aboriginal art with Djon Mundine, a curator of Australian art, in Campbell Hall, room 153.

Through her paintings and more recent installations, Foley has been instrumental in bringing Aboriginal art to international attention and showing that it is not limited to traditional methods and motifs, but also uses Western and contemporary materials.

Mundine is a leading figure in the Australian art world, according to Margo S. Boles, curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, which John Kluge donated to the University several years ago. In 1989, Mundine commissioned a large group of works from the Ramingining territory for Kluge's collection. He and Foley co-curated in the early 1990s two exhibits of contemporary Aboriginal paintings called "Tyerabarbowaryaou -- I Shall Never Become a White Man."