ABOUT THIS BOOK

In the early 1970s at Papunya, a remote settlement in the Central Australian desert, a group of Indigenous artists decided to communicate the sacred power of their traditional knowledge to the wider worlds beyond their own. Their exceptional, innovative efforts led to an outburst of creative energy across the continent that gave rise to the Contemporary Aboriginal Art movement that continues to this day. In their new book, anthropologist Fred Myers and art critic Terry Smith discuss six Papunya paintings featured in a 2022 exhibition in New York. They draw on several discourses that have developed around First Nations art—notably anthropology, art history, and curating as practiced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous interpreters. Their focus on six key paintings enables unusually close and intense insight into the works’ content and extraordinary innovation. Six Paintings from Papunya also includes an afterword by Indigenous curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist, who reflects on the nature and significance of this rare transcultural conversation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Fred Myers is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University and author of Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, also published by Duke University Press.

Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art, also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

“While Fred and Terry appreciate that Indigenous art is in tacit dialogue with dominant approaches to categorization, their conversations work to reduce this determinative power. There is no desire to coax these paintings into familiar and complacent categorizations. On the contrary, they are genuinely responding to the intellectual and cultural challenges of the paintings by shaping a critical vocabulary and methodology that can best apprehend them. . . . They show us the richness of Indigenous cultural practices and the tools with which to apprehend them. Indigenous art and culture deserve nothing less.”—

-- Stephen Gilchrist, from the Afterword

“Fred R. Myers and Terry Smith’s shared knowledge of the history of Papunya painting as an art movement is invaluable. Smith’s authority as a historian and theorist is unmatched. Equally compelling is Myers’s anthropological research with the Pintupi; his writing on the reception of the art is unparalleled. Their conversations bring the reader to the gallery floor as these two great minds think through this art.”

-- Ian McLean, author of Double Nation: A History of Australian Art

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night

Classic Pintupi Water Dreaming

The Trial

Big Cave Dreaming with Ceremonial Objects

Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa

Ngalyipi (A Small Snake)