Kluge-Ruhe › Aboriginal Art Collection
Tjumpo Tjapanangka, Kangaroo Dreaming at Lake Mackay, 1991 ©2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Viscopy, Australia
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yam Dreaming of My Country, c.1991 ©2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Viscopy, Australia
Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Family Bush Tucker Dreaming, c.1972 ©2009 Aboriginal Artists Agency, Sydney
Jimmy Angunguna, Marrchila (Saltwater Crocodile), 1996 ©2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISCOPY, Australia
Staff of the Kluge-Ruhe Collection
Margo Smith, director & curator
Margo Smith (BA Willam & Mary; MA, PhD UVA) is the director and curator of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UVa and conducted fieldwork in central Australia from 1991-1993. She co-edited Art From the Land: Dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal Art with Dr. Howard Morphy published by the University of Virginia in 1999. In 2003, 2004 and 2005 Dr. Smith taught Exploring Indigenous Australia, a unique course involving four weeks of intensive study and travel in Australia.
Dominique Cocuzza, curator of collections
Dominique Cocuzza (BA, Rutgers; MA, FIT) is the associate curator and registrar of the Kluge-Ruhe Collection. She moved to Charlottesville in 2008 after serving six years as Collections Manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, in New York. Prior to that, Cocuzza worked for one year as assistant conservator at the American Museum of Natural History. She has wide-ranging museum and archive experience having worked at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Lauren Maupin, museum office administrator/education and program coordinator
Lauren Maupin (BA, Messiah College, MA, UCL) provides educational, programmatic, and administrative support to the Kluge-Ruhe Collection. She has a MA in the History of Art from University College London, and brings work experience from a number of art galleries internationally, several art historians, and an independent curator. She also teaches an introductory art history course at Piedmont Virginia Community College.
Howard Morphy, adjunct curator
Professor Howard Morphy (BSc, M Phil London; PhD, ANU) has served as advisor to the Kluge-Ruhe Collection since 1995. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in northeast Arnhem Land and is currently the Director of the Research School of the Humanities at Australian National University. Dr. Morphy is the author of several books including Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press), Aboriginal Art (Phaidon) and, with Marcus Banks, Rethinking Visual Anthropology (Yale University Press).