The Kluge-Ruhe Collection has planned a fieldtrip to two Aboriginal art exhibits in Washington DC on Saturday, November 21. Participants will visit Culture Warriors at the Katzen Art Center at American University and Land of Enchantment at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA).
A bus will depart the Kluge-Ruhe Collection at 8:15 am arriving at NMWA around 11 am. Kluge-Ruhe Director and Curator Margo Smith will lead a tour through Land of Enchantment: Australian Aboriginal Painting. This exhibit contains 26 paintings by desert artists such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Bessie Nakamarra Sims and Doctor George Tjapaltjarri from the collection of Ann Shumelda Okerson and James J. O’Donnell.
Shortly after noon the bus will take the group to American University. Participants will enjoy a box lunch provided by Wagshal’s Deli followed by a tour of the Australian Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors at AU Museum. Culture Warriors includes 90 works by thirty artists from every state and territory in Australia. A wide variety of contemporary art forms are represented including painting on bark and canvas, sculpture, printmaking, photography and video. This traveling exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Australia and curated by Brenda Croft.
The bus will depart Washington DC at 4 pm arriving back at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection around 7 pm.
Registration is required for the field trip. Registration forms are available online or from the Kluge-Ruhe Collection. The cost of $65 per person includes transportation, entrance fees, tours, and a box lunch. For questions or more information, please call 434 244-0234 or email the Kluge-Ruhe Collection.
The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia will undertake a major project to preserve bark paintings in the collection. The project, which involves cleaning and re-housing approximately 530 bark paintings, was supported by University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III through the allocation of University discretionary funds.
The Kluge-Ruhe Collection is considered to be the most important collection of Australian Aboriginal art outside Australia. One third of the Kluge-Ruhe collection consists of bark paintings from northern Australia. Dating from the early 1940s to 2007, bark paintings in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection are historically and culturally significant. Demonstrating regional stylistic and thematic differences, bark paintings typically illustrate ancestral stories associated with the creation era know as The Dreaming. They are closely tied to art traditions such as rock art, body paint and ground sculpture.
Bark paintings are constructed from organic materials that are naturally unstable. The substrate consists of a sheet of bark from the Eucalyptus tetradonta (stringybark) tree. The paints are derived from pigments such as red and yellow ochres, pipe clay and charcoal mixed with natural and synthetic paint binders. During this project, Kluge-Ruhe staff will carefully examine and document each painting. Paintings will be surface cleaned if needed and re-housed in stackable storage customized for each work. The trays will enable staff to move, store and access bark paintings without handling them. This project will preserve the art, improve the appearance of the paintings, and make them more accessible to Kluge-Ruhe staff and researchers.
The National Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors opened at the Katzen Art Center at American University on September 8 and runs through December 6. On loan from the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), the exhibit includes the work of 30 Indigenous artists representing every Australian state and territory. All of the works were created since 2004 in a variety of media, including painting on bark and canvas, sculpture, textiles, weaving, photography, video and printmaking. This inaugural exhibition was curated by Brenda Croft, former Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the NGA. The opening festivities were attended by Croft and eight of the artists included in the exhibition: Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Daniel Boyd, Gordon Hookey, Ricky Maynard, Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jr, Christopher Pease, Christian Bumbarra Thompson and Judy Watson. Australia’s Minister for the Evironment, Heritage and the Arts Peter Garrett, was also present at the opening.
On Friday, September 11 the artists visited the Kluge-Ruhe Collection and UVA Art Museum to see works on exhibit and in storage. One of the highlights of the visit was Jean Baptiste Apuatimi’s identification of Tiwi objects in the Kluge-Ruhe Collection. After lunch, the group met students who are studying Australian Aboriginal art at the UVA Art Museum to see the bark paintings and large canvas from Kluge-Ruhe currently installed there. They walked over to the lawn for a brief orientation on Jefferson’s Academical Village before returning to Washington DC.
The Katzen Art Center is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11:00 am to 4:00 pm. Admission is free and there is on site parking. Click here for more information.
