1,187 research outputs found
Textiles and Tactility
No full textThe cotton and silk batik lengths created by the central Australian communities of Ernabella and Utopia, and screenprinted fabrics by Tiwi artists are held in renown and most commonly contemplated as representative examples of Indigenous textile art. [1] The Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (Anangu) [2] women from Ernabella (Pukatja), a community of around 500 people at the eastern end of the Musgrave Ranges in northern South Australia, have developed a design tradition that defies conventional expectations of what Aboriginal art is, or should be. [3
Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative: Interview with Hetti Perkins and Brenda Croft
No full textThis interview took place in a back room of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Coop,
Abercrombie St, Sydney, on the 10th February, 1995, surrounded by easels
and half·complete works of art, the paint smell bringing back all the fond
memories of working with paint. The first time I visited Boomalli was to choose
a work for the cover of a forthcoming book on Aboriginal history. Hetti told me
this was the room the artist, Harry Wedge, used for a studio. Hetti, who I had
first met as an undergraduate student at the University of New South Wales
some years ago, was now about a month off having her third child. I had not
met Brenda before, but had heard of her as a key figure in the NSW art world
home/lands
No full textInspired by the words of revered Indigenous leader Vincent Lingiari, ‘that land ... I still got it on my mind’, this exhibition reflects on the Gurindji Walk-Off, a seminal event in Australian history that reverberates today. The Walk-Off, a nine-year act of self determination that began in 1966 and sparked the national land rights movement, was led by Lingiari and countrymen and women working at Wave Hill Station (Jinparrak) in the Northern Territory.
Honouring last year’s 50th anniversary, curator and participating artist Brenda L. Croft has developed the exhibition through long-standing practice-led research with her patrilineal community and Karunkgarni Art and Culture Aboriginal Corporation. Lingiari’s statement is the exhibition’s touchstone, the story retold from diverse, yet interlinked Indigenous perspectives. Still in my mind includes photographs and an experimental multi-channel video installation, history paintings, digital platforms and archives, revealing the way Gurindji community members maintain cultural practices and kinship connections to keep this/their history present
Special Edition: Brenda Hillman’s most treasured book
No full textAs part of its ongoing series spotlighting the most treasured books of Bay Area residents, DATEBOOK, the San Francisco Chronicle\u27s arts and entertainment news and events guide, highlights a selection from Saint Mary\u27s English Professor and renowned poet Brenda Hillman. In the article, Hillman, the author of nine collections of poetry, and the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry at the College, writes about the importance of her 95-year-old mother\u27s King James Bible to her family. Read Special Edition: Brenda Hillman’s most treasured book
Interview with Dr. Brenda Child
No full textDr. Brenda Child (Red Lake Ojibwe) is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of several works, including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), which comes from her 1993 University of Iowa dissertation. In this interview, Dr. Child discusses public history and her work in several national exhibits as well as her most recent work My Grandfather\u27s Knocking Sticks (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014).
Interviewer Mary Wis
Brenda Flanagan, 33rd Annual ODU Literary Festival
No full textBrenda Flanagan left school in Trinidad at age 14 to help support her family. In 1967 she came to the USA, where she worked as a domestic servant. Marriage and motherhood further kept her from an education until 1975, when she began her studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of the prize-winning novel You Alone Are Dancing, a collection of stories, In Praise of Island Women and Other Crimes, and the forthcoming, Allah in the Islands
Wave Hill/Victoria River Country
No full textWith a diverse career as an artist, researcher and independent curator, Brenda L. Croft has been creating multi-disciplinary, multi-platform work for more than three decades. In 2015 she received a National Indigenous Arts Award Fellowship from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts in recognition of her practice. She is a member of the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra peoples from the Northern Territory of Australia, and of Anglo-Australian/German/Irish heritage. Her artworks draw on personal and public archives and explore issues faced by contemporary Indigenous peoples and the ongoing impact of colonisation in Australia since 1788. Through her work she aims to give “a voice to the voiceless, making the invisible visible - listening, seeing, being and sharing.
For subalter/N/ative dreams, Croft has been working closely with her family and community at Wave Hill and Victoria River regions in the Northern Territory and dislocated Gurindji community members elsewhere. The timing of this exhibition has a many-layered significance for Croft; it is the 20th anniversary of the death of her father Joe, a member of the Stolen Generations, the 40th anniversary of the NT Land Rights Act and the 50th anniversary of the Gurindji Walk-Off from Wave Hill Station on 23 August, 1966. The Gurindji Walk-Off was a defining moment, not only for Indigenous peoples but in Australian history. A committed group of Traditional Custodians walked off one of the country's largest pastoral stations in a profound act of resistance and self-determination. It marked a nine-year long strike and engendered the birth of the national land rights movement.
Croft's work considers the ongoing legacies of colonisation; how many Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their language, ceremony and cultural connections and how the imposed language and culture has been used to define, constrict and displace Indigenous people within their own lands.
In a brutally honest, immersive body of work, a series of self-portraits on country features Croft on traditional homelands and in displaced communities, looking straight down the barrel of the lens, defiantly present and unapologetic. Another series features images of the artist drawn from original wet collodian plates where she appropriates descriptors used for her father and others in her immediate and extended family - full-blood, half-blood, half-caste, quarter-caste, quadroon, abo. Her image challenges such debasing classifications used to subjugate Indigenous people now, as in the past, whilst also highlighting there is no single Indigenous way of being.
In shut/mouth/scream, Croft's face is dissected by the frame and starkly echoes an image of her paternal grandmother taken many years before during medical research. Trac(k)ed through the public archives, the latter image was located seven decades after it had been taken at Kahlin Aboriginal Compound in Darwin where Croft's grandmother and father had been taken in the late 1920s. Its reclamation, through Croft's visual call and response, is an angry howl at the abject treatment meted out not only to her grandmother and other family members, but to all Indigenous peoples impacted by authoritarian regimes, which continues to this day
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