Emily Kam Kngwarray’s kin travelled to Canberra for the opening of the NGA exhibition. Photo: Chisa Hasegawa.
For the central desert women, it was a journey of honour and remembering – a time for ceremony and a time for celebration.
This year’s National Gallery of Australia summer exhibition is a mighty tribute to one of Australia’s great post-war artists, Emily Kam Kngwarrey (1910-1996), a maker of marvellous works who used first ceremonial painting, then batiks, then acrylics and canvas to tell the story of her country and her pencil yam dreaming.
The Anmatyerr woman painted “awely” – everything from her world – and while her works were hailed internationally, the global art market was never her primary aim or even her intention when she began exhibiting in her mid-70s.
“This old woman’s paintings have their origins in our country and we hope you all enjoy looking at them,” her sisters and aunties, her kin who had travelled from Utopia to Canberra for the exhibition launch, told national media.
“Listen to the story she tells and the women’s songs she sings.”
Emily Kam Kngwarray’s Alkhaler country in the Simpson Desert. Photo: Dylan River, Supplied.
The women were also in Canberra to perform traditional awely ceremonies for the exhibition opening. Kngwarray held these as a senior women’s law custodian in the Alhalker country where she was born, in the northwest corner of the Simpson Desert.
“She was the boss of that ceremony,” the women said.
Kngwarray’s Alhalker suite, a huge and brilliant installation of 22 panels along a single wall at the NGA, is an explosion of colour that evokes the land in flood, its wildflowers, spinifex and blossoming trees and reflects the joy she took in her country.
The suite is among more than 80 paintings, batik and works on paper, some owned by the gallery and others on loan from private and international collections and brought together by First Nations curators and fellow “desert women” Hetti Perkins and Kelli Cole.
The exhibition is accompanied by the Summer Project series of 81 paintings, originally commissioned by Rodney Gooch from the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association. He left 100 canvases at the Utopia community in 1988 to be completed by women in the community and these were eventually collected by the Holmes à Court Foundation.
The Canberra exhibition is not the end of the story. Tate Gallery director Maria Balshaw was present to announce the exhibition will travel to London, and there is also a feature film in production about Kngwarray’s work from Tamarind Tree.
The Summer Project wall of paintings at the entry to the Kngwarray exhibition. Photo: Chisa Haswegawa.
A show of this significance – the first time the National Gallery has ever represented a First Nations artist at this scale – is also a major story for the ACT, as Visit Canberra chief Jonathan Kobus notes.
The exhibition will likely create millions of dollars in accommodation and hospitality income for the city, part of a trajectory that began in 2011 with the ACT’s major events fund launch and has contributed $500 million in economic value for the city over the past 12 years.
Jonathan Kobus says the uplift is “sizeable” in many ways. Beyond the dollar value, the exhibition enhances Canberra’s reputation on a global scale, raising awareness of Canberra’s cultural heft and aligning with the ambition to be Australia’s arts and culture capital
“Canberrans are fortunate to have world-class exhibitions like this in the city where they live, and hopefully they invite family and friends here too,” he said.
“This is a compelling reason for people to visit the city.”
Emily Kam Kngwarray at the National Gallery of Australia runs from 2 December to 28 April 2024.
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