My essay, moving painting, began as a paper presented at the 2014 AAA Annual Meeting. What I had to say in that context was composed around this collection of 25 paintings, curated from the 2007-2014 oeuvre of Pintupi-Luritja-Arrernte artist Kunmanara M. Namiptjinpa Boko from the Tangentyere Artists group in Alice Springs.

Kunmanara wasn’t able to come to Washington D.C. with me. In her absence, and in keeping with the experimental ambitions of the panel, which (like this special issue of VAR) was titled Hyper-realism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking it with the Truth,’ I designed my text to be performed as a conversation with her paintings. Projecting her paintings on a large screen and running them as a continuous slideshow while I talked would render the human figures in the images at a size at least as large as the people they depict, possibly larger. They would be present with us as characters in Kunmanara’s world.

The role of the paintings in the presentation was not to illustrate my thoughts. The images, and Kunmanara’s words about them suffused, led and also interrupted what I had to say.

Playing with visual scale as a parameter of interaction became one of the first axes of the experimental new media design work that Kunmanara and I began before her untimely death in late 2017. Playing audio recordings of Kunmanara’s spoken word stories alongside the images as a performative experiment was to be one of the next steps in our creative process.

My original presentation transformed itself in its transition from conference paper to publication. Significantly, I had to reduce the original number of images from 30 to 7, dramatically changing my approach to telling a story about them. This Supplement provides a great platform for a more in depth visual consideration of the original selection of Kunmanara’s artworks. It also allows me to provide a few additional Australian Aboriginal art historical details that are important for contextualising her paintings as part of a more extensive history of Aboriginal people pictorially documenting the dynamics of their survival and the dramatic transformation of their worlds post-European invasion and ‘settlement.’

Australian Aboriginal people have, of course, painted important stories for millennia prior the arrival of whitefellas in their lands, on rocks, bodies and on the ground.

See Sayers (1994) for an excellent account of the early (post-)colonial pictorial works using other mediums by Aboriginal artists William Barak, Tommy McCrae, Mickey of Ulladulla, Oscar, Billiamook and others.

In the central Australian desert, comparisons can be drawn between the painted human biography and history-centred story work of Kunmanara Boko and other Tangentyere Artists and artists at Warakurna Artists (eg. amongst others, Eunice Porter; http://warakurnaartists.com.au/), Maruku Arts (eg. amongst others, Niningka Lewis; https://maruku.com.au/), Iwantja Artists (eg. amongst others, Jimmy Pompey; http://www.iwantjaarts.com.au/), and Martumili Artists (eg. amongst others Doreen Chapman; http://www.martumili.com.au/). Similar narrative motivations inspire the sculptural figuration and animations made at Tangentyere Artists’ sister art centre Yarrenyty Arltere (3D fabric sculpture; http://www.yarrenytyarltereartists.com/), as well as the wire and found object sculpture at Keringke Arts (http://keringkearts.com.au/artworks/) and the signature pots created at Hermannsburg Potters (eg. amongst others, Anita Ratara Mbitjana; https://hermannsburgpotters.com.au/). Tjanpi Desert Weavers working with native grasses, raffia, wool and other materials (https://tjanpi.com.au/) have produced astounding figurative works that include historical and ancestral characters, animals, plants and whitefella machinery like trucks, cameras and windmills.

The vast corpus of painted and printed stories by South Australian Ngarrindjeri artist Ian Abdullah (1947-2011) made from 1988 onwards is perhaps the closest work stylistically to Tangentyere Artists paintings, especially those that include painted text within the frame (see Fox and Maughan, 2003). Both Abdullah’s and Kunmanara’s art might also be located within a genealogy of powerful and self-consciously political contemporary Blak Australian Indigenous text-based art and wordplay by artists from other parts of Australia including Tony Albert, Fiona Foley, Archie Moore and Vernon Ah Kee, about which there has until recently been, in Jacob G. Warren’s words (2017, 54), “an art-historical silence.”

I hope you enjoy looking at this gallery of Kunmanara Boko’s paintings. Use your browser’s zoom-in function to look more closely. The digital images are intentionally relatively small, to help protect the artist’s Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property rights. For further information about the pictures in this gallery please contact me directly. For more information about the work of Tangentyere Artists or to purchase their work, see https://www.facebook.com/tangentyere.artists and http://www.tangentyereartists.org.au.

References

Fox, Stephen and Janet Maughan. 2003. Ian W. Abdulla – Elvis Has Entered the Building. Adelaide: Wakefield Press.

 Sayers, Andrew. 1994. Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century. Melbourne, Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia.

Warren, Jacob G. 2017. “’Pay Attention Mother Fuckers’: Outlining a Strategy of Wordplay in Australian Indigenous Text-based Art.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 17 (1): 54-67.