Australian Perspecta 99

A major, fully illustrated publication featuring more than 50 essays on the work of contemporary Australian artists has been produced in conjunction with 'Contemporary Australia: Optimism'. The publication includes engaging essays by authors John Birmingham and Melissa Lucashenko, filmmaker Elissa Down and Queensland Art Gallery staff. It is available in hard and soft cover from the Gallery Store and online at www.australianartbooksonline.com.au

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 a reflection by Indigenous curator and scholar Stephen Gilchrist, who reflects on the nature and significance of this rare transcultural conversation.

This text presents Simeon Nelson's artworks and allows the reader to interpret them through an accompanying analysis by art critic, Benjamin Genocchio. The text examines the inspiration for Nelson's art, clearly describing its meanings while responding to its immense beauty and wonder.