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Streets of Papunya: The Reinvention of Papunya Painting

Streets of Papunya: The Reinvention of Papunya Painting

Current price: $49.99
Publication Date: July 1st, 2016
Publisher:
NewSouth
ISBN:
9781742232430
Pages:
224

Description

Some of Australia’s most exciting contemporary art comes from the daughters of the ground-breaking Papunya Tula artists of the 1970s, the founding fathers of the desert art movement. Streets of Papunya is the story of the women painters of Papunya today, rising stars of the town’s new Papunya Tjupi art centre. Among them are some of the first women in the desert to join the original Papunya art movement, who continue Papunya’s rich history as the birthplace of contemporary Indigenous art. Western Desert art expert Vivien Johnson reveals for the first time the whole history of Papunya as a site of art production, from Albert Namatjira’s final paintings, executed in Papunya days before his death in 1959, through Papunya’s glory days of the 1970s and ’80s, during the dark time when it was known as "carpetbagging capital of the desert" to its inspirational renaissance, as its leading painters reinvent Papunya painting for the twenty-first century.

About the Author

Sydney writer, researcher, curator and teacher Vivien Johnson’s pioneering books on Western Desert artists and her work on Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights have had considerable social impact. She curated the 2003-5 Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri national touring retrospective and the National Museum of Australia’s Papunya Painting: out of the desert which toured to Sydney and Beijing (she also wrote the accompanying book). Her Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists published in 2008 by IAD Press won the 2009 Chief Minister’s Northern Territory History Book Award. Her most recent book is Once Upon a Time in Papunya.