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• TUESDAY May 21, 2013 F

William King Museum draws ‘Circles in the Sand’

Aboriginal art from Australia’s Central Desert is featured in the newest exhibition at Abingdon’s William King Museum: Center for Art and Cultural Heritage.

“Circles in the Sand,” on display through Sept. 9 in the museum’s United-Legard Gallery, includes work from three desert communities — Yuendumu, Papunya and Balgo — each with their own distinct history and style of painting.

In putting together this exhibit, the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection focused on the art centers associated with these communities, which not only market art on behalf of the artists but also serve community interests and empower Aboriginal people to achieve their own goals.

Incorporated in 1985, Warlukurlangu Artists of Yuendumu is one of the most successful community art centers in the Northern Territory. Today, it claims 600 members, mostly Warlpiri- and Anmatyarre-speaking people from Yuendumu and surrounding settlements.

The name Warlukurlangu, meaning “place of fire,” comes from an important ceremonial site located near the community. Sacred sites and ceremonial designs connected to the ancestral creation era known as the Dreaming, or Tjukurrpa, provide the inspiration for the art produced by Warlukurlangu Artists.

The contemporary western desert art movement began in 1971, when a school teacher named Geoff Bardon encouraged men in Papunya to paint murals on the school wall. The paintings sparked tremendous interest in the community, and the men started painting smaller works, which were sold in Alice Springs.

In 1972, the artists established their own company, Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd. Today, Papunya Tula represents over 120 artists from the communities of Papunya, Kintore and Kiwirrkura and many smaller settlements.

The Papunya Tula painting style draws on a body of knowledge about the Dreaming. Papunya painters use symbols derived from sand drawing and body paint designs to illustrate Dreaming stories.

Through the sale of their art, Papunya Tula artists have been able to establish permanent settlements in their country and maintain a lifestyle that supports their culture.

The community of Balgo Hills, or Wirrimanu as it is called by Aboriginal people, is separated from Yuendumu and Papunya by the Tanami and Great Sandy deserts. Balgo was founded as a Catholic mission in 1939 and today serves a population of about 500 people from seven different language groups: Tjaru, Kukatja, Ngarti, Pintupi, Walmatjarri, Wangkajunkga and Warlpiri.

Acrylic painting began at Balgo in the late 1970s, when anthropologist Ronald Berndt encouraged people to paint on composition board. However, it was the success of the contemporary art movement in Papunya in the mid-1980s that enabled Balgo artists to see their own potential using acrylic paints.

In 1986, the Art Gallery of Western Australia introduced Balgo artists to the wider public through an exhibition called “Aboriginal Art from the Great Sandy Desert.” The community art center, Warlayirti Artists, was established in 1987, and today represents hundreds of artists from the region.

Balgo paintings echo the practice of marking the ground in sand drawing, which Aboriginal people from Balgo categorize into two types. The first type, called walkala, is secular sand drawing used by women to relate stories to children or to illustrate how and where to find and cook bush food. The second type of sand drawing, called kuruwarri, is used during ceremonies to summon ancestral power and to tell the deeds of the ancestors. Kuruwarri designs are considered to be representations of ancestral beings and are themselves powerful.

U.Va.’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection is the largest collection of Australian Aboriginal Art outside of Australia, and came into being in 1997 through a gift by American businessman John W. Kluge. Influenced by the “Dreamings” exhibition in New York, Kluge began collecting Aboriginal art in 1988. Over the next decade he compiled one of the finest private collections of Australian Aboriginal art in the world.

In 1993, Kluge purchased the collection and archives of the late Professor Edward L. Ruhe of Lawrence, Kan. Ruhe began collecting Aboriginal art while visiting Australia as a Fulbright Scholar in 1965. He built a collection of the highest quality and exhibited it widely in the United States between 1965 and 1977.

The William King Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Thursday; and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

Admission is $5 for adults and $3 for seniors. Members, students and children get in free.

For more information on this exhibition, related events and other museum goings-on, visit www.WilliamKingMuseum.org.

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