Ancient Lands . . . Ageless Stories
November 11 - December 30,2023
Redbud Arts Center:Ancient Lands . . . Ageless Stories 2023
"Redbud Arts Center and Booker-Lowe Art will present its first joint exhibition, Ancient Lands . . . Ageless Stories, featuring paintings by leading and emerging Australian indigenous artists, opening Saturday, November11th, 2023, with a reception from 6-9 pm, at Redbud Arts Center, 303 East 11th Street, Houston TX 77008.
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Australia’s contemporary Aboriginal art movement, the exhibit showcases works by such acclaimed painters as Rosella Namok, Silas Hobson, and Fiona Omeenyo from Lockhart River near the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, as well as established and emerging artists, including Jeffrey Jangala Gallagher, Theo (Faye) Nangala Hudson, and Joycie Pitjarra Morton, from Australia’s vast desert country. The exhibition will also include a selection of older works, some just released from private collections.
Australia’s First Nation artists draw on their heritage as the world’s oldest living culture, with a 50,000-year history of drawing on cave walls, in the sand, on bark, and on their bodies for ceremony.
The contemporary Aboriginal art movement began in the early 1970’s at Papunya, a remote government settlement in the Northern Territory. At the urging of the local school’s art teacher, a group of senior men agreed to paint a mural of a tribal Tjukurrpa, or Dreaming story about their Honey Ant ancestor. Using modern paints and brushes, they created a striking abstract work on a school wall, and soon after, began painting on canvas, old floor boards, whatever they could find. These small paintings quickly attracted attention at a small art gallery and on the streets of Alice Springs, several hundreds of miles away. Soon, men and women from other indigenous communities began painting, translating their own traditional patterns onto canvas. Today, hundreds of Aboriginal painters from coast-to-coast exhibit their works, portraying a cultural journey unlike any other, in museums and galleries not only in Australia but throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S.
“We are thrilled to partner with Redbud Arts Center to present Ancient Lands . . . Ancient Stories,” said Nana Booker AM, Honorary Consul Emeritus of Australia and former owner of Booker-Lowe Gallery, the longest-running Australian Aboriginal art gallery in the Americas. “Gus and Sharon Kopriva have long had an appreciation for Australia and its indigenous people and were among our first visitors and clients at Booker-Lowe, so we feel as if we are coming full circle working with them to share Australian Aboriginal art!”
“After my first visit to the Northern Territories in the early 2000’s, I observed original cave paintings in Kakadu National Park in Arnhem Land. I became enthralled with the symbolism and storytelling from some of the most ancient artists in the world”, Gustav Kopriva of Redbud Arts Center said."
Reception: November 11, 2023 | 6-9 pm
Redbud Arts Center
303 East 11th Street
Houston, TX 77008
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