Reviews Archives - Kluge-Ruhe: Madayin

The Cavalier Daily: Become enriched in Yolngu Aboriginal culture through the Fralin’s “Madayin” exhibit

February 8, 2024 | Charlotte Walden

Originally published in The Cavalier Daily, February 8, 2024.

Madayin at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Photo by Robbie Favaro/The Cavalier Daily.

A pounding voice chants rhythmically alongside a projection of waves crashing as one enters the Fralin Museum of Art. The museum’s newest exhibit, titled “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala,” is an all-encompassing sensory experience that showcases traditional bark paintings of the Yolngu Aboriginal Australians.

For millennia, Yolngu people have been partaking in this ever-flowing, continuous art. The method of creation for bark paintings involves stripping Eucalyptus bark, which is flattened, dried and sanded to create an optimal surface for painting.

Then, Yolngu artists use natural pigments and ochres alongside water and an adhesive binder to create a material that can be used for paint. They use this paint to depict their respective family’s deeply important clan designs — called miny’tji — onto the bark.

When it comes to the name of the exhibit, “Madayin” roughly translates to mean the sacred, or something extremely sublime or beautiful. From the bark paintings to the connections being created by Yolngu artists, this exhibit fully encompasses the meaning of “Madayin”.

A big misconception in Western interpretations of Aboriginal and Indigenous art is that it cannot be modern. However, the paintings in “Madayin” are indeed contemporary art. While these pieces are deeply rooted in a rich artistic tradition, they are ever flowing and ever evolving — all while honoring the legacies of ancestors by preserving their techniques.

U.Va. is the home of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, which is the only museum outside of Australia purely dedicated to art from Aboriginal Australians, thanks to the donated collections of John Kluge and Edward Ruhe.

Because of the presence of Aboriginal art in Charlottesville, Yolngu leader W. Wanambi wanted to strengthen the rich relationship between these two vastly different geographical regions. He played an integral role in the creation and curation of “Madayin,” but passed away three months before the exhibition opened in 2022 at the first venue of its tour, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth. In his lifetime, Wanambi took many long journeys from Australia to Charlottesville where he masterfully developed the exhibit.

“[The exhibit] is an incredible testament to his courage and willingness to cross boundaries, and work with institutions to change the ways in which museums operate,” said Henry Skerritt, assistant professor and Kluge-Ruhe curator of Indigenous Arts of Australia.

A part of the innovation and change that Skerritt is referencing is the structure of the exhibit. Both unique and extremely intentional, the physical space is meant to represent vital Yolngu systems of belief.

“Madayin” is based on a key Yolngu concept known as Dhuwa and Yirritja. This concept splits everything in the world into either Dhuwa or Yirritja, similar to Yin and Yang. To demonstrate this quintessential duality, “Madayin” is split in two. As one enters the actual gallery space, you choose which way to go — either left for the Yirritja side or right for the Dhuwa side. The art displayed on each side is symbolic of your choice, and at the center of the gallery Dhuwa and Yirritja meet as one, representative of the Yolngu belief in the interconnectedness of the world, known as “Country.” To try and put a very complex and significant term into just one sentence, “Country” describes how everything living and in nature and spiritually is connected.

Artist Gunybi Ganambarr explained that this total, all-encompassing idea of reality and connectedness is the reason why the flowing water visual is displayed at the entryway. As Ganambarr describes, water connects us all, and we all interact with it.

“We cross the river and we bring water from that end to this end to meet other people and other nations … sharing the knowledge and carrying the knowledge,” Ganambarr said.

Mayatili Marika, a deeply influential Yolngu leader for education and advocacy, further articulated this idea of connection.

“We are not just related to each other as humans, but we are related to everything else within the cosmos as well,” Marika said.

Many of the pieces in “Madayin” are themselves concerned with human connection — specifically connections across cultures. One piece — “Journey to America” by co-curator Djambawa Marawili — serves as an example of the contemporary nature and bridging of culture in Yolngu bark painting.

In Marawili’s piece, there is a depiction of the Statue of Liberty at the very top, while the Australian coat of arms is emblematically placed in the lower left. The combination of imagery from the United States and Australia highlights the ever-growing connection between the two nations, and the history of bark painting shows the connection of past to present.

Symbolic of this international connection is Dhukumul Wanambi, daughter of W. Wanambi. She traveled to the United States for the opening of “Madayin” at the Fralin in honor of her father and his love for sharing his community’s art and deeply-rooted traditions.

Marika discussed the importance of this long-lasting familial legacy for Yolngu artists working as a part of “Madayin.”

“[The elders] paved the way for us to be able to come here to places like Charlottesville and other places in America through mediums like the “Madayin” exhibition … it is a great honor to be able to keep showing our art and culture to audiences throughout the world,” Marika said.

The curators of “Madayin” — Marawili, Wanambi, Skerritt, Yinimala Gumana, Wäka Mununggurr and Kade McDonald — alongside the Yolngu artists and innovators who have contributed to the exhibit, have effectively elevated the voices of Aboriginal artists on an international scale in the art world.

The “Madayin” exhibit is a part of Charlottesville’s Indigenous Art Takeover — a program that includes five different Charlottesville-area exhibits, all of which center Indigenous art in Oceania and Australia. Each exhibit in the Indigenous Art Takeover will be open at different times, with the final one closing on July 14 — giving audiences ample opportunities to experience internationally famous and profound pieces.

The Daily Progress: Generations of family stories and songs inform Aboriginal art at The Fralin

February 3, 2024 | Jane Sathe

Originally published in The Daily Progress February 3, 2024.

*Madayin* exhibition opening, The Fralin Museum of Art, February 1, 2024. Photo by Tom Cogill.

A new exhibit opening this weekend begins by sweeping viewers back in time.

“Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala,” which opens Saturday at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, premiered at the Hood Museum of Art in Dartmouth in September 2022 before heading out on a national tour that led it back to its Charlottesville connections.

The idea for bringing the paintings together and sharing them with the world came to Yolŋu artist and leader Djambara Marawili in 2015 during his residency at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at UVa. But the origins of the artworks, and the generations of creation stories and family bonds that give them life, go back far deeper into history.

When asked Thursday how long it takes to complete one of the intricate paintings on painstakingly prepared and cured eucalyptus bark, Henry Skerritt, Kluge-Ruhe curator and assistant professor of art history at UVa, responded, “About 65,000 years.”

A six-member delegation of Yolŋu artists and curators who attended a media preview Thursday at the Fralin explained how the paintings on display reflect not merely aesthetic principles, but also a rich oral history handed down from parent to child and grandparent to grandchild.

“It’s art to an outside eye, but to us, it is text,” said Mayatili Marika, who will present the W. Wanambi Distinguished Lecture at 4 p.m. Saturday in the Dome Room of the Rotunda. “It’s multifaceted and multidimensional.”

Even her talk will make connections, tying in “Madayin” with another exhibit, “Waŋupini: Clouds of Remembrance and Return,” which will remain in the Upper West Oval Room at the Rotunda through July 8.

In the Yolŋu culture, storytelling is an important way to convey intricacies of family history and the behavior of natural world. What can sound like a tangent to someone outside the culture can offer vital information about connections among family and community members to someone who cherishes the stories.

“We talk in spirals. To get from Point A to Point B is not linear,” Marika said. “Each and every thing that exists — everything on the seas, the land — fits into a finite space in the cosmos. Just as the tides go in and out, so do guests, and knowledge.”

A video of crashing ocean waves, accompanied by traditional singing paired with didgeridoo and percussion, spans a wall to greet visitors climbing the stairs to see “Madayin” at the Fralin. It extends a welcome to visitors as they enter the realm of the paintings and their stories of connection.

Dhukumul Wanambi, 20, took time to explain the background of “Destiny,” a bark painting by her father, Wukun Wanambi. A small mullet-like fish swims through rivers, creeks and oceans in search of his destiny, which he discovers while he is surrounded by his family.

Other paintings document the traditional motifs that would have been painted on a human body during ceremonies. “The shimmering power of it is the ancestors still occupy your mind,” Skerritt said. “You’re only seeing the surface.”

Attention shown to the artworks serves different purposes in different cultural environments. Westerners often are far more impressed by prestigious international accolades the artists have won for their paintings, while the artists themselves are more gratified to see how modern technology and wider exposure can bring the stories they treasure to wider audiences and new generations, Skerritt said.

Marika’s lecture is one of a dozen events connected to the exhibition. The artists led a tour of “Madayin” on Friday afternoon, followed by a First Fridays reception.

Other local galleries have opened complementary exhibitions, including Second Street Gallery’s “First Nation Australia: Contemporary Artists from the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala,” which can be seen through March 22, and “Ukapalamin: Eti Ko Eti: Resilience: Stories from the Torres Strait,” on view through April 22.

Already on view at the Fralin is “Voices of Connection: Garamut Slit Drums of New Guinea,” which features handmade drums capable of communicating over long distances to connect people in remote areas who otherwise could be hard to reach.

“Madayin” is organized by Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at UVa in partnership with the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Center in Australia and curated by Djambara Marawili, W. Wanambi, Yinimala Gumana, Waka Munungurr, Henry Skerritt and Kate McDonald.

“Madayin” can be seen at the Fralin through July 14 before moving to the Asia Society in New York, where it will open in September.

Humanities Magazine: Aboriginal Expressionism

May 3, 2023 | Angelica Aboulhosn

Originally published as “Aboriginal Expressionism” in the Spring 2023 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala at American University Museum, Washington, D.C. Photo by Tom Cogill.

Maḏayin, a monumental survey of Aboriginal Australian bark painting at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C., opens with the image of a shark, anchored in a sea of black and rust-red brushwork, speared. Next, a crocodile shoots fire across an ocean, wire-thin strokes of white giving way to pools of russet and amber.

The show, its name translating to “sacred” and “beautiful,” comprises more than 80 paintings: most elongated, some figurative, and all deceptively simple. What appears at a distance as a dense field of color is up close a latticework of delicately handled pigment, each stroke intentional.

“We want you to come to the grassroots level, to sit in the sand and let us show you a different way of coming to the paintings,” Wukun Wanambi, one of the show’s curators, writes in the exhibition catalog, insisting on a kind of looking as expansive as the pictures themselves. These works on bark, all from Yirrkala in northern Australia, are layered with meaning, gesturing to—or, precisely, embodying—ancestral beings.

To the Yolŋu, or Indigenous people living in the northeast Arnhem Land region (the word “Yolŋu” translates to “people”), these works are far from folktales; they are alive, thunderously, in the here and now.

In Maḏayin, walls of indigo and white are arrayed with variegated, column-like barks: Intricacy is vividly on display. The curators, some of whom are Indigenous artists themselves, let the Yolŋu speak. The show’s bilingual catalog—a series of artist essays presented first in the painters’ native languages, then in English—foregrounds the artists, who are also authors in their own right. Here are people worth knowing, the show proclaims, here is a story worth telling.

The story begins, in Maḏayin, when five Japanese fishermen were killed, in 1932, at Caledon Bay in northern Australia. Three Yolŋu men, sons of the clan leader Woŋgu Munuŋgurr, were sentenced to prison for the murders. Australian anthropologist Donald Thompson was sent to the community on a peace mission, later organizing for the release of Woŋgu’s sons. In thanks, the clan leader painted for Thompson, in 1935, a lively work on bark—the earliest in the show—peopled with lizards, tortoises, and other abstracted designs, silhouetted against a wash of black pigment.

While bark painting in Australia has a long history—there are nineteenth-century accounts of paintings on the walls of bark huts—Woŋgu’s 1935 picture signaled the beginning of the practice in Yirrkala. Preserved under glass in the exhibition, the only work so presented, Woŋgu’s painting is sacred, jewel-like—a superbly rendered claim on the land.

“Every time [the Yolŋu] have their backs against the wall, they have responded by producing art, by producing masterpieces,” notes Henry Skerritt, curator at the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, which co-organized the show with the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala. “They have responded to aggression with this beautiful gift of art, and, in the long run, the Yolŋu have prevailed.”

The paintings are more than art. To the Yolŋu, they are a way of keeping ancestral beings alive, of “singing life,” as artist Djambawa Marawili puts it. The poet Mona Tur, writing about Ayers Rock in central Australia, captures something of their pathos: “My heart bleeds, our beloved rock . . . / As evening comes, . . . your haunting beauty / Mirrors beauty beyond compare.”

Midway through the show is a work of electric blues. A departure from the exhibition’s sand-tinged palette, the bark reverberates with a life all its own. Following a car accident, artist Dhambit Munuŋgurr was unable to grind the traditional ochres normally applied as bark pigments and turned instead to acrylics. The effect is arresting. At the azure-blue picture’s center is the sacred rock Dhambit, from which the artist takes her name. Meanwhile, the ground is overlaid with cobalt-blue, Basquiatesque, octopuses. Nothing is still in this bark. Passages of navy and black cut across the visual field like glass shattering.

These bark paintings, Skerritt says, represent “one of the modern and contemporary art movements of our time.”

Indeed, when the National Gallery of Victoria, in 1995, staged a show of Indigenous bark paintings, the director chose to hang Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman opposite the exhibition entrance, a nod to the barks’ modernism and their growing popularity.

But this popularity is relatively new. In the preface to a 1965 catalog of Australian Aboriginal bark paintings, the work is described as the “art of primitive people,” adding that the barks are “at first sight simple and ever childlike.”

Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala at American University Museum, Washington, D.C.

The Milky Way (2019) is a powerful rejoinder to this. Hanging in the show’s second, half-lit, room, the bark is layered with thick bands of bespeckled black and white pigment. Intercut with four-point stars that seem to emerge and recede, it is suspended, aglow. For artist Naminapu Maymuru-White, the work speaks to two qualities of the Yolŋu aesthetic: shimmering brilliance, or bir’yun, and faintness, or buwayak, the latter harking back to the soul’s transition to the spiritual realm. The work feels hushed, careful not to give itself away. As anthropologist Howard Morphy puts it, the bark exudes “the felt presence of a transcendent spirit seen ‘through a glass darkly,’” referring to Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, wherein truth, in this life, is known only obliquely.

Most of the catalog essays open with a kind of disclaimer: “I can only talk of the surface part of the story,” says artist Noŋgirrŋa Marawili. Her work, of orbs oscillating on fields of dust-pink and brown, contains secret or esoteric meanings. For the Yolŋu, each painting tells multiple stories: some restricted and some public. What is restricted, and known only to initiated men, runs parallel to what is public. As Morphy insists, the Yolŋu’s theory of knowledge is cumulative: “The layering is as important as the secrecy.”

Layers abound in Waŋupini (Clouds), a bark piled high with rippling black flourishes. A signal of monsoon rains to come, the billowing clouds float on a cobweb-like bed of razor-thin brushstrokes. The joy is in following the lines, losing oneself at every turn.

A fluidity of perspective permeates Maḏayin. Forms are elusive, patterns break free of their mold: Everything is tenuous. At first glance Retja I (Rainforest I) is a subtle play of blossoms. Up close, its sumptuous, cranberry-red berries spiral, as if rustling in the wind. In the catalog, Waṉambi writes, “When we see the flowers blossoming, we sing,” each bud a reminder of the ancestors who will “bloom again.”

In Bonba, an energetic field of russet-red and burnt-orange stripes is interrupted by a flurry of white feather-like forms. The figures, we learn, are by turns humans, butterflies, and kites, their very being flitting back and forth. “Their physical identity is unstable,” anthropologist Frances Morphy writes in the catalog. “They move easily between two states of being.” Here, as elsewhere, the world is in flux.

Traversing the show are stories of the ancestors. Known as songlines, these stories are traditionally sung in ceremonies and are recorded in the catalog and the show’s wall text in a kind of prose-poetry. One songline, reproduced in the exhibition book, recalls lost souls: “The wind comes singing for the dead / Hear its song as it chases over the rocks.” Each line transcends what is, thrilling to what has been and will be. “These songlines,” artist Wanyubi Marika remarks, “take you to another world, different from the physical world.”

By singing these prose-poems, by painting them, the center can hold. These stories, Marika stresses, exist within his very being, never to be lost: “Stand in both worlds if you want. But make sure you hold this one first: your roots and your foundation.”

Among the most absorbing works in the show is Dhatam | Waterlily (Nymphaea sp.), a picture of interlocking lace-like spheres softly veiling the deep, receding space. The painting, alive with a silvery tonality, feels impermanent: In a second, it might be gone. Dreamlike, the densely packed water lilies seem to take flight, one after another, then all at once.

The speared shark that opens Maḏayin, we learn in the adjacent wall text, calls out in anguish: “My flesh is broken with weariness / Where is my home?” For a moment, he is lost to us, a mere shadow among forms. But, in the upper half of the bark, we can make out the subtle strokes of his fins, set against the motley pattern of the ground. He has found his way, pronouncing by the text’s end, “Here I am.”

Angelica Aboulhosn is an associate editor for HUMANITIES magazine.

Her Campus: AU Museum Highlights Global Status of Aboriginal Australian Bark Paintings

March 3, 2023 | Ellie Blanchard

Her Campus

MAḎAYIN: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala at American University Museum, 2023. Photo by Tom Cogill.

A collection of bark paintings on display at the American University Museum this winter honors Aboriginal Australian people’s connection to their land and promotes the genre’s prominence in the contemporary art scene.

“Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” stages paintings created in the Northern Peninsula of Australia by the Yolŋu people. Achieving meticulous detail with fine brushes of human hair, the artists applied ochres and other natural pigments to create scenes on strips of eucalyptus bark, said Director of the AU Museum Jack Rasmussen.

The depth found in the artwork is not immediately evident to the uninformed viewer, said Dhukaḻ Wirrpanda, an artist featured on the Maḏayin exhibit website. When non-Aboriginal people view bark paintings, sometimes they see “only pretty pictures, nice patterns and all that,” he said. Within these pictures of sea and land creatures, weather events and ceremonies exists a series of narratives of ancestral beings that illustrate the Yolŋu people’s connection to their land.

Depictions of unity with the land are more than a cultural display. For decades, bark paintings have been used as legal evidence in court cases for Aboriginal land rights.

In response to a federal plan to build a mine on an Aboriginal reserve in 1963, Yolŋu people created the Yirrkala Bark Petition. These bark paintings became the first documents prepared by Aboriginal Australians to be formally recognized by Parliament, according to the Maḏayin exhibit website.

The use of bark paintings in the fight for land rights continued into the early 2000s, said Lauren Maupin, the manager of education and programs at the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, the organizing institution of the Maḏayin exhibition.

Yolŋu leader and artist Djambawa Marawili, whose work is featured in the Maḏayin exhibition, collaboratively presented a claim for ownership of the intertidal zones so Yolŋu could control who could access those waters and whether they needed permission from traditional owners, Maupin said. Bark paintings were made as supportive evidence for this High Court sea rights case, which was successful in 2008.

Because Maḏayin is composed entirely of art produced within the past 85 years, Rasmussen said the exhibit is an opportunity to view bark paintings as modern art.

“These are all contemporary artists,” said Rasmussen. “They’re living now. They’re choosing to work within this tradition.”

Maḏayin is the first exhibit of Aboriginal Australian bark paintings to tour internationally, and Yolŋu artists participated in the decision-making processes associated with the exhibit, according to an American University news release.

After a history marked by the removal of Aboriginal people from their lands, Rasmussen calls Maḏayin a form of reparations.

Australia is “acknowledging the great importance and beauty of the work,” he said. “Now it becomes a really great symbol of Australia itself.”

The Yolŋu artists involved in developing Maḏayin preferred that their work be displayed in a location that had previously shown Aboriginal art. After hosting the “Australian Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors” exhibition in 2009, the AU Museum met this qualification.

Maḏayin’s relevance to American University, which is home to the School of International Service, promotes diversity in its strategic plan and has a politically involved student body, also motivated Ramussen’s team to host the exhibit.

The AU Museum is Maḏayin’s second stop on its tour after a premier at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. The bark paintings are “living things,” Rasmussen said, so the challenge in transportation is preserving their flexibility while preventing cracks in the art. Individual crates housed each piece during the move, and the art must be kept in temperature and humidity controlled conditions, he said.

Yolŋu artists and curators of Maḏayin will visit the AU Museum on March 31 for panel discussions and cultural ceremonies open to the community. The exhibit will be on display at the AU Museum until May 14.

The Washington Post: Australian Aboriginal Art that transports you to another world

February 14, 2023 | Mark Jenkins

The Washington Post

Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala, American University Museum, Washington, D.C. Photo by Tom Cogill.

Populated by sharks, snakes and kangaroos, but mostly by densely arrayed lines and shapes, the pictures in Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting From Yirrkala represent the universe. The enigmatic designs in the American University Museum show conjure a vastness that contrasts with the smallness of the area in which the artworks were made: the eastern side of Arnhem Land, a craggy peninsula that juts from Australia’s northern coast.

Indigenous Australian art, in the form of carved or painted rock, is known to be at least 40,000 years old. But Yirrkala’s madayin miny’tji – designs deemed both beautiful and holy – were revealed to the wider world less than a century ago. After several 1930s incidents in which outsiders were killed, Australian anthropologist Donald Thomson traveled to the area to seek reconciliation. He earned the trust of an elder of the Yolngu clans, Wonggu Mununggurr, who made a painting of sacred designs and gave it to Thomson.

That 1935 picture is included in this traveling show, which was organized by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Indigenous-owned Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Center in Australia. The painting is characteristic of the Yolngu style. Their pictures are densely patterned with natural pigments in black, white, and shades of tan and brown, and rendered with a human-hair brush on the inside of a sheet of eucalyptus bark.

Most of the nearly 90 pictures are recent, and a few demonstrate the influence of modern technology or global travel. Dhambit Mununggurr’s Ocean employs synthetic blue paint to depict the sea and its creatures, notably octopuses. The Statue of Liberty appears at the top of Journey to America by Djambawa Marawili, one of the show’s curators.

More typical, though, are pictures that simultaneously depict and embody the north Australian landscape. Since their canvases are stripped from tree trunks, the formats are always vertical and sometimes towering. Imperfections in the bark are preserved and incorporated into the compositions. The pigment colors are both symbolically and literally earthy.

Less traditional but no less engrossing are two near-monochromatic paintings, both titled The Milky Way, by Naminapu Maymuru-White. They depict stars as well as a particular river in Arnhem Land, or perhaps stars reflected in that river. The diamond-shaped celestial lights twinkling within gray ribbons also exemplify life and death, since Yolngu lore says that terrestrial creatures are transformed into ethereal entities.

Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala, American University Museum, Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy American University Museum.

The exhibition includes several videos that document ceremonial dances and song cycles, and illustrate the significance of the sea to the Yolngu, which is one aspect of the people that distinguishes them from other Australian Indigenous groups.

The anthropological aspects of Maḏayin are interesting and useful, if perhaps not essential. Yolngu cosmology is a lot harder to grasp than the visual power of the clans’ art. To ponder these intricate paintings is to be transported to another land, even if it’s one that can’t fully be understood.

Art Collector reviews MAḎAYIN

January 1, 2023 | Briony Downes

Art Collector Magazine

Currently touring the USA is Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Paintings from Yirrkala, a collaboration between the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala.

Developed over seven years, Maḏayin (a Yolŋu term meaning sacred and hidden) has been curated with a strong focus on gurruṯu (the Yolŋu kinship system) which extends to people, Country, waterways and all they contain. It is the first major exhibition of bark painting to tour the USA and is entirely overseen by a curatorium of Yolŋu artists and knowledge holders from the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre.

Inspired by an idea instigated by Djambawa Marawili, Maḏayin is designed to bring the included bark paintings to life by incorporating interwoven elements of song, dance and language. “This exhibition is a great opportunity for our people to come together and share our culture, and do research on our paintings,” says Marawili. “Our patters and designs have been laid on a certain Country, when the ancestors passed through naming it: ‘You are Marawili, this is your Country, this is your identity.’ Every individual clan has their own Maḏayin, but there is also a Maḏayin that brings all those clans together.”

Rather than relying on historical or chronological order, the exhibition takes in a much broader cultural context. It features work drawn from international public collections in addition to 33 newly commissioned pieces, including four large video projections of Yolŋu ceremonial dance by filmmaker and co-curator Ishmael Marika. “It’s a type of curation the Yolŋu were born into, it’s part of their system,” says Kade McDonald CEO of Agency Projects. “The works might physically be on the wall, but they must be presented with song, they have a dance attributed to them, they represent a sacred place in Country. Everything interconnects and must make sense.”

Embracing the separate yet interconnected moieties Yirritja and Dhuwa, Maḏayin unfolds in a unified whole with historical works mixed in with contemporary works. The idea behind this was to authentically reflect how Yolŋu see their culture. “We have these paintings for future generations to look upon and gain respect for those people that came before,” explains Marawili. “In that way, today we are making art for the children who are coming behind us, giving a clear message to them. It is something that we really need to make the art move in our eyes and our soul, to make it really do something important.”

Maḏayin will show in the USA at the American University Museum at the Katzen Art Centre, Washington D.C. from 4 February to 11 March; the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach, from 22 August to 2 December; The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia from 25 January to 21 July 2024; and the Asia Society, New York from 24 September 2024 to 5 January 2025.

Artscope Magazine: “An Inspirational Pairing”

November 1, 2022 | Marguerite Serkin

Published in the November/December 2022 edition of Artscope Magazine

Naminapu Maymuru-White working at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, 2021. Photograph by Leicolhn McKellar.

Merriam Webster provides a primary and secondary definition of Indigenous: “produced, growing, living or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment” and “of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group.” Both definitions might be applied to the cultural foundations of two expansive exhibitions running concurrently at the Hood Museum in Hanover, New Hampshire. “Park Dae Sung: Ink Reimagined” and “Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” embody the preservation and development of personal and artistic identity in the wake of occupying influence, and the enduring strength of cultural tradition.

Born in Kyŏngsang Province in 1945, the year Japan surrendered its decades-long annexation of Korea, Park Dae Sung was five years old when he lost his parents to wartime violence, and he lost his left hand to the same violent conflict. Park dropped out of school as a young teen to escape the taunting and bullying of his peers. Calligraphy, drawing, and painting became mooring, centering constants for Park, and without access to formal training, he devoted himself to the lifelong pursuit of refinement and knowledge in developing his artistry. Park’s personal quest led him to visit the Diamond Mountains in the North, to walk the Silk Road in China, and eventually brought him to New York where he discovered the enchantment of cityscape.

Park’s work imparts a deep respect for traditional ink painting techniques, calligraphy and true-view painting while boldly incorporating innovative and often prescient approaches to scale, composition and stylistic variation. At The Hood, a single painting on paper spans an entire gallery wall, combining conceptual integrity and balance with almost supra-humanly precise brushwork (“Magnificent View of Samneung,” 2017, ink on paper). There is an inherent gentleness in the ink’s application, and an ethereal transcendence in Park’s landscapes portraying water, sky and vaulted rock (“Mt. Halla,” 2019, ink on paper).

Strongly influenced by Buddhist tradition as well as Christianity, the spiritual dynamics of Park’s practice are understated yet unmistakably present. “I am a Catholic but don’t draw specific figures or buildings for religious reasons,” Park shared in recent correspondence. “I control my mind balance by praying every day, every time. I believe the energy I get from those praises helps me develop as a good artist.

“As an artist, I think the core thing you should do is to practice basic skills constantly and keep the acuity to observe an object correctly,” Park continued. “For example, I never stop practicing calligraphy, which is essential for drawing. Even now, I put a lot of time and effort into writing and drawing right.”

When asked about the effect of personal losses he experienced as a young boy, during a presentation at the Korea Society in 2015, Park stated, “I feel that suffering is actually a prerequisite for developing a clear and peaceful mind. One of my mottos is to ‘lean into the discomfort.’” Continuing, Park said, “I feel that you need to have discomfort in order to have a clear and meditative state of mind to do your best work… I really try to live my life according to the laws of nature so that I can keep on working and keep that inspiration flowing.”

North-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia has been continuously inhabited by Indigenous peoples for at least 40,000 years. Among the Yolŋu people, sacred knowledge originating with Ancestors has been passed down generationally as song lines, ceremonies and visual patterns — each of which tell a story, or many stories, and carry indispensable guidance from which members of interrelated, yet distinct clans form their lives, laws and traditions.

Entrusted to the anointed few who guard their secrets, patterns are at once sacred expressions and a mapping of the way of life for all generations. The rituals of marking patterns date back thousands of years, and in the mid-20th century emerged in a new form as painting with locally-sourced pigments applied to strips of bark cut from the Eucalyptus tetrodonta tree. The technique of bark painting has been transmuted into the present day by a dedicated group of artists whose belief in the practice’s intrinsic worth and relevance drives a mission to bring the works to a wider audience of “balanda” (non-Yolŋu) in order to share the paintings’ figurative and literal intelligence, and the beauty they emanate.

Kade McDonald, Waka Munuŋgurr, Djambawa Marawili and Henry Skerritt curating Maḏayin at Kluge-Ruhe, 2018. Photo by Callie Collins.

“Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” is the result of a seven-year collaboration between the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, partnering with The Hood Museum; the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre in northern Australia, and primarily with the Yolŋu artists/curators themselves. As the only museum outside Australia dedicated to the exhibition and study of Indigenous Australian art, Kluge-Ruhe is uniquely positioned to support “Maḏayin,” and by naming the late multi-media artist Wukun Wanambi as curator, the exhibition became a visionary model in allowing an unfiltered voice to emerge directly from the Yolŋu. As Margo Smith, Director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, stated in her foreword to the 350-page hardbound exhibition catalogue “We do not pretend to understand Yolŋu art in the same ways Yolŋu knowledge holders do, recognizing and appreciating both their knowledge and the limits we encounter in fully comprehending Yolŋu culture.”

“Maḏayin” includes 90 individual pieces, 33 of which were specifically commissioned by Kluge-Ruhe for the exhibition. Entering the galleries housing “Maḏayin” at The Hood transports the viewer away from any lesser mundane concerns or worldly preoccupation, into a reality which seems to hover in a state of timeless suspension. Transfixing, almost hypnotic in their exquisite precision, intricate and complex patterns appear to reach outward from the undulant surfaces of cured eucalyptus bark, while simultaneously pulling the focus deeply inward, to a place of unspoken communion with all that makes us human. In a visual sense, the curatorial choice to raise each piece — some as tall as 12 feet — with empty space between wall and object, creates a compelling effect of weightlessness contrasting with the potent density of the works themselves.

Djutjatjutja Munuŋgurr’s “Dhuruputjpi,” 1996, natural pigments on eucalyptus bark, depicting the ancestral shark in ancient waters with a surrounding layer of patterned palm leaves, embodies the paradoxes of precision and fluidity, delineation and inclusion. Bright yet somber, there is an elemental reverence in the deliberate application of detail and design. The sinuous order of Barrupu Yunupiŋu’s “Gurtha (Ancestral Fire),” 2010, natural pigments on eucalyptus bark, pushes against boundaries of interrelation and fragmentation, forming an implied unity which supersedes the separation of its individual parts.

Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala at the Hood Museum of Art. Photo by Rob Strong.

“Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” represents what is best in intercultural collaboration. By approaching the exhibition in a spirit of appropriate humility and with an openness to learning, museum leadership have allowed each work to directly express its origins and meaning without an imposed interpretive perspective of the societal outsider. As Jami Powell, Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum, shared in recent correspondence, “For too long Indigenous art has been contextualized and presented within colonial frameworks. Having the Yolŋu artists as the lead curators on Maḏayin was essential to the exhibition’s success. Their leadership and guidance helped focus our attention on what aspects of the work and narrative were most important to the Yolŋu themselves and how they wanted their work to be shared with the public. This centering of Indigenous, and particularly Yolŋu, ways of knowing and being in the world is characterized by an incredible intellectual and aesthetic generosity that benefits all audiences.”

Kinship and cooperative living have stood as the basis for Yolŋu society for millennia, and the importance of communal interest in guiding behavior, in addition to the paintings’ stunning visual impact, are clearly relevant to the intended viewing audience of “Maḏayin.” As Djambawa Marawili AM, Chairman of Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre wrote in his foreword, “We are the Yolŋu people of northeast Arnhem Land. In this exhibition, we are telling this to you in the United States. We are sending our paintings across the sea to share with you that we have our own identity, our own sacred objects, our own songlines, our own patterns and designs, our own maḏayin (sacred system). This is not just an exhibition but is us sharing with you the ancestral knowledge that runs in our soul and our blood. We have been keeping this identity for thousands and thousands of years, and now we are sharing it with you.”

The Dartmouth Review: Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum

October 19, 2022 | Zoe E. Dominguez

The Dartmouth Review

Photo by Rob Strong. Courtesy Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth.

Hanover’s very own Hood Museum of Art is hosting Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from September 3 until December 4. The exhibit hails from northern Australia and is the first major collection of Aboriginal Australian bark paintings to tour in North America. Sixteen tribes wished for their elders to have a painting featured, which resulted in a mixture of art that was selected and art that was commissioned specially for the series.

Upon entering the gallery, guests are given some history about the relationship between Western civilization and Aborignal Australian bark painting. In the fall of 1932, the elders of the Djapu’ clan were disrespected by five Japanese fishermen. The actions of these fishermen resulted in their death. When the police were sent to investigate, Constable Albert McColl was also killed. The three sons of Djapu’ clan leader Woŋgu Munuŋgurr were arrested and found guilty of the murders. A fourth man, Dhäkiyarr Wirrpanda, was arrested as well but mysteriously disappeared after being acquitted at the trial. Rumors circulated that McColl’s colleagues were responsible for Wirrpanda’s disappearance. As tensions in the region were rising, anthropologist Donald Thomson formed a relationship with Woŋgu and his sons while they were still in prison. Thomson negotiated the release of the Munuŋgurr sons in exchange for Woŋgu’s promise to keep the peace in northeast Arnhem land, known to those who inhabit it as Miwatj. The first painting on display in the exhibit was one of many gifts to Donald Thomson from the Munuŋgurr family. The art is from the year 1935, but the patterns and designs featured in the painting are far older.

The front of the exhibit shows a statement from Wukuṉ Waṉambi, one of the curators for the collection. “We have shared these paintings to give you an understanding of our world. If you are expecting to learn everything about the meaning of the many designs and how they relate to song cycles and ceremony, then you are mistaken. We cannot explain everything. Like the surface of the water, beneath is an ocean of knowledge. We can only show you the surface,” says Waṉambi. The sacred layers of meaning underneath the surface of the paintings are not ours to know.

The stories within the bark paintings are cornerstones of each tribe’s way of life and tradition. Displaying such an intimate form of cultural expression was a challenge for not only the curators, but the artists themselves. These paintings, as in the example of the Munuŋgurr family and anthropologist Donald Thomson, were often given as precious gifts. The artists viewed their work as a gift with the intention to transport their homeland to audiences in North America.

Henry Skerritt, curator of the Indigenous Arts of Australia at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, told Dartmouth students about the difficulties his team faced in transferring this collection to North America. In fact, Skerritt says, Australian legislation was changed to allow for the paintings to leave the continent and travel to the United States. The regulations of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986 were altered to recategorize certain Aboriginal bark paintings so they could be exported out of the country.

Visitors to the exhibition view Djambawa Marawili’s *Americalili Marrtji* at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth. Photo by Rob Strong.

Beyond legal challenges, the curators of Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting faced a unique challenge with fusing aesthetics and culture. Ultimately, the story told within the exhibit overpowered the desire for aesthetic beauty. Though there are more than 90 paintings in the exhibit, works of art were removed from the initial collection during the process of curation due to their lack of coherence with the overarching themes of the collection. Other pieces, Skerritt said, were too sacred to be on display for the masses. The goal of curation was to represent one body of kinship. Each painting is a story told with the intention of communicating a story from one generation to the next.

Some of these works were commissioned at the moment a gap was noticed in the greater story that the curator wanted to tell. The artwork on the paintings contains the same symbols, themes, and mediums that Australian Aboriginals have employed for centuries to pass down legends to the next generation. In the entirety of the collection, only one, very blue, painting features acrylic paint. All other paints were pigments ground from ochre clay and mixed with water to display on the canvas of bark.

There are many important works throughout the exhibit, but my personal favorite was Americalili Marrtji | Journey to America which depicts the Statue of Liberty. The artist, Djambawa Marawill, depicts a faraway land in the artform familiar to his native people. In giving his clan the gift of this painting, Marawill shares with them a piece of America. How grateful we are, then, to receive a fraction of the rich tradition to be found within Maḏayin.

From a Volunteer’s Vantage Point

October 18, 2022 | Stacy Luks

Madayin at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH, on Wednesday, September 7, 2022. Copyright 2022 Rob Strong.

An illuminated wall of lapping sea water beckons at the entrance to MADAYIN at the Hood Museum of Art. Sounds of foamy waves overlaid with Indigenous voices singing is an irresistible invitation into a slower, richly complex world.

Just home from three days of art and culture-immersive events for the MADAYIN opening, my thoughts return to that entry space, and a concept expressed by Yolŋu curator, Mr. Wanambi, who likened viewing bark paintings to looking at the water’s surface, knowing there are unseeable depths, yet remaining content in the liminal space.

In my 2 years as a Kluge-Ruhe guide, I’ve become accustomed to discussing this duality in Australian Indigenous art, whereby the works reveal, and simultaneously conceal. Now having “skimmed the water’s surface” of the MADAYIN project, I see this duality as metaphor for the museum volunteer experience itself. On the surface, there’s alluring beauty in the art on our Pantops mountain farmhouse walls; and behind the scenes, unbelievable dynamism and activity buzzes, boldly projecting this art and culture to a much wider audience.

In truth, bark painting wasn’t a genre that readily drew me in. MADAYIN is, within the museum’s physical walls where I operate – both too big for those walls, and somewhat invisible on a daily basis. As a volunteer, I felt challenged in how to meaningfully engage.

It took time; but I was curious. I took advantage of moments like observing conservators preparing barks for MADAYIN , and chatting with collections manager and registrar Nicole Wade about the rigors that months of touring and fluctuating humidity conditions entail. I read, engaged with online content, listened to podcasts. Slowly I came to see what this massive endeavor signifies.

When Margo asked me, in my professional capacity, to handle travel logistics for the elders and artists coming from YIrrkala for the Hood’s opening, I was honored. Then came the opportunity to attend, meet the distinguished Yolŋu, and fold into the wider museum community.

It was both a huge responsibility – to the traveling delegation – and a privilege, to be present at the culmination of this monumental 7-year achievement for the museum. The Yolŋu-led opening ceremony of song, sounds of the yidaki and bilma, and beckoning of guests up the entry-way stairs into the exhibit was powerful.

I wondered how the travel-weary Yolŋu who’d journeyed so far felt to see their works, and those of their forebears, aunties and uncles, expertly displayed – all purposely arranged according to their culture’s twin moieties and distinct clan designs, as they would encounter them back home.

DJ Marika playing his *yidaki* as part of the celebration of Madayin at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH. Copyright 2022 Rob Strong.

At dinner I sat with DJ Marika, the delegation’s ‘youngster’, making his first trip to the US. A performance artist and grandson of legendary Yirrkala artist and activist Wandjuk Marika, DJ was the featured yidaki player for the Hood events. His yidaki bore wide yellow, red and black bands of tape, the colors of the Aboriginal flag. The tape also served to protect the instrument from changing humidity conditions DJ knew he would encounter on the journey.

I recall that saying, “the medium is the message.”

This exquisite bark medium is truly a revered messenger. The majestic barks in MADAYIN both shimmer and sing. Their presence in the US is a generous invitation to glimpse the complex world of a small community of ancient people who, speaking through their art with power and authenticity, patiently altered the course of their continent’s history.

The Dartmouth: Maḏayin makes history at the Hood

October 11, 2022 | Gianna Totani

The Dartmouth

On Sept. 3, the Hood Museum of Art debuted its newest exhibition: “Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala.” Organized by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia in partnership with the Buku-Larrŋay Mulka Centre in Australia, “Maḏayin” makes history as both the first major exhibition of Aboriginal Australian bark painting in the United States and the largest display of Aboriginal Australian art in the Western Hemisphere in 30 years.

“Maḏayin” allows the Yolŋu people to convey the stories of their culture, families and heritage. Many of these stories originated in Yirrkala, the northeast Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. “Maḏayin” is the first exhibition for which Yolŋu people have been asked to participate in the curating and decision making processes. According to Wakun Waṉambi, artist and Yolŋu co-curator of Maḏayin, no Yolŋu have ever curated before this exhibit — it was a job for the “non-Yolŋu” who do not understand the rich history of these paintings in the same way the Yolŋu do. This partnership allows for the unique, authentic voices of Indigenous Australian people to be displayed in an American museum.

In the opening remarks of the exhibition’s media event, Hood Museum director John Stomberg said that the exhibition has undergone a long journey.

“[“Maḏayin”] is a project that our colleagues at the Kluge-Ruhe have been working on for seven years, but a tradition that goes back much farther,” Stomberg said. “I think one way of thinking about this exhibition, this art, these wonderful paintings, is that it is a beautiful flower, with roots that go down 80,000 years.”

According to the information displayed on the walls throughout the exhibition, the Yolŋu have a deep culture that was confusing to follow at times. However, in curating “Maḏayin,” the Yolŋu people organized the pieces according to their kinship system, called gurruṯu. Gurruṯu is known to the Yolŋu people as raki, or string, and it is how all Yolŋu people are connected. The raki also applies to the land, sea, creatures and plants. Through this interconnectedness, the Yolŋu people have great knowledge of the land and the sea; they belong to the land and everything in their world through gurruṯu.

The Yolŋu people have another way of classifying their pieces throughout this exhibit. All Yolŋu clans belong to the Dhuwa or the Yirritja, complementary groups, or moieties. Yolŋu people must marry someone from the opposite moiety, and Yolŋu children always take their father’s moiety. Each artist on display in “Maḏayin” belongs to one of sixteen different clans; eight are Dhuwa and eight are Yirritja.

Henry Skerritt, curator of Indigenous arts of Australia at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection, explained that this exhibition is about relationships.

“It’s about families,” Skerritt said. “It’s about speaking across cultures, but it’s about doing it in your own words, about respecting each other’s way of seeing the world.”

Upon entering the exhibition, viewers are greeted by a full-wall projection of the ocean waves in Australia. On the adjacent wall there is a quote by Wukun Waṉambi, a recently deceased artist and member of the exhibition’s curatorial team.

“Like the surface of the water, beneath is an ocean of knowledge,” Waṉambi said. “We can only show you the surface.”

This quote sets the expectation for the exhibition before viewers move upstairs to view and appreciate 80 bark paintings that explain the rich history of the Yolŋu.

For decades, the Yolŋu people have painted their clan designs on themselves and other ceremonial objects. These ancestral land designs of intricate patterns are maḏayin, a term that means sacred and beautiful. With some paintings standing over 12 feet tall, the paintings are created on sheets of eucalyptus bark using natural pigments. Although the color scheme of these paintings only consists of a few natural colors, the patterns and meanings behind these paintings are vibrant, drawing viewers in to learn and understand.

“Maḏayin” incorporates older pieces dating back to 1935 and some newly commissioned paintings created by Yolŋu Aborigial Australian artists specifically for the exhibit. As visitors move throughout the exhibit, they will also experience the use of film. Produced by Ishmael Marika, a Yolŋu filmmaker and integral person in the curation of “Maḏayin,” there are four floor-to-ceiling projections of Yolŋu ceremonial dance. The combination of new media and sacred, ancestral paintings blend beautifully.

During the press event for “Maḏayin,” Ishmael and Djuwakan Marika, a Yolŋu father and son team, ceremonially performed a song about birds before viewers were guided through the exhibition and given an authentic history of a few specific bark paintings.

“Destiny” (2019) is a piece by Wukun Waṉambi, a member of the Marrakulu clan. From far away the piece looks like dots on a large piece of eucalyptus bark. However, as the viewer moves in closer, the detail of hundreds of small fish becomes clear. Through this piece, Waṉambi tells the story of a fish called Wawurritjpal that swims through the water, wondering where his path is. Going alone at first, the fish traveled from river to river until he found his own family. Then, the fish returned to the rock and laid down his spirit with his family.

According to Djuwakan Marika, a Yolŋu musician, dancer, artist and the grandson of the great artist Wandjuk Djuwakan Marika, “Destiny” displays more than just the story.

“It brings the rain,” Marika said. “[The Yolŋu] typically like stories. Story comes with the songlines.”

The designs presented by the Yolŋu people make viewers feel the Yolŋu’s rich tradition and family ties, while also providing a platform for them to educate viewers in a setting that has never heard the voices or stories of these people.

Will Stubbs, the director of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Arts Centre in Yirrkala, Australia summarized the power and beauty of “Maḏayin.”

“This exhibition traces the trajectory of sharing by allowing people who will never understand the intricacies of Yolŋu culture a window into what might exist on that other side of that fence through the power of visual art,” Stubbs said. “This is ‘Maḏayin’: sacred, secret, law and maḏayin, beauty.”

“Maḏayin” will remain at the Hood Museum of Art until Dec. 4. After Dartmouth, the exhibition will embark on a nationwide tour.

Valley News: Aboriginal Offerings continue at the Hood Museum

September 22, 2022 | Eric Sutphin

The Valley News

*Madayin* at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH, 2022. Copyright 2022 Rob Strong

At the entrance to “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala,” at the Hood Museum of Art, a mural-sized film of crashing waves paired with a melodic song in Yolngu Matha (the Yirrkala language) creates an immersive experience. Voices echo above the rushing sounds of the waves and meld with rhythmic percussion. Against this backdrop, a gently illuminated bark painting is displayed in a vitrine in the center of the entry gallery.

In Yolngu parlance, madayin refers to that which is sacred and beautiful. “Madayin represents the coming together of sixteen Yolngu clans. … These songs are performed to signal the beginning of a ceremony, calling participants to a sanctified space,” a text adjacent to the video says. Yolngu refers to the clans who inhabit Yirrkala, a region in northern Australia.

The exhibition centers on Aboriginal bark painting, and is the result of a collaboration with the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, among other institutions. It’s a scholarly exhibition and there are copious wall texts describing, often in the artist’s own words, the meanings of the works and how they fit within the greater socio-political context of clan society.

The Hood’s engagement with Aboriginal Australian art began in 2004 when the museum mounted an exhibition titled “Dreaming of Country: Painting, Place, and People in Australia.” In the following decade, the museum acquired the collection of Will Owen (1952-2015) and Harvey M. Wagner (1931-2017) which sparked a series of exhibitions centered around Aboriginal art and culture. For “Madayin,” the museum tapped Djambawa Marawili, an artist and leader of the Madarrpa clan, to oversee the curatorial team.

As you scan the exhibition and read the materials, it becomes clear that the bark paintings are expressions of Yolngu cultural identity. They are more than artworks; they are modes of communication, governmental documents, historical records. The intricate patterns that cover them represent the ways in which every aspect of nature, personhood, political governance and family structure are interwoven.

The tradition of bark painting dates to about 1935, making it essentially a contemporary practice. However, the designs and the meanings are products of millennia of tradition and technique passed down among artisans through generations. As the supplementary material explains, the designs were originally “painted directly on the bodies of young men when they were initiated.” It’s important to keep in mind while viewing the works that they are more than “art for art’s sake.”

The paintings start with large sheets of bark stripped from eucalyptus trees. The strips of bark are then slowly warmed and flattened out and sanded to a smooth, workable surface. Earth pigments like ochre and white clay mixed with binder are traditionally used for the paint. One striking piece incorporates blue acrylic paint. It was the only example in the exhibition that employed synthetic pigment, and it made the piece look more “modern” than the earth-tone works.

Another piece that deviates from the standard format is a monumental wall piece composed of 299 small squares of bark arranged in a massive grid. In character, this work struck me more as a contemporary wall sculpture, something reminiscent of the minimalist works of Eva Hesse. This isn’t a stretch, considering the long history of so-called “ethnographic art” being appropriated by Western artists.

While most of the work is abstract, without recognizable imagery, there are examples that depict human, animal and plant forms. These representations are wonderfully stylized and expressive amidst the labyrinthine networks of lines and shapes that adorn the surfaces. Videos throughout the exhibition show men in traditional dress performing dance and song. These echo the contents of the bark paintings and remind viewers of the multiple dimensions that these works convey. The Yolngu designs are powerful and they evoke a feeling of unity, of oneness, that is rarely captured in visual art.

Eric Sutphin is a freelance writer. He lives in Plainfield.

Wall Street Journal: Madayin: Sacred Patterns, Celestial Images

September 19, 2022 | Judith H. Dobrzynski

The Wall Street Journal

*Madayin* at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH. Copyright 2022 Rob Strong

“MADAYIN: EIGHT DECADES of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting From Yirrkala” presents artworks that are largely unknown in the U.S. While recent decades have cast light on the “dot paintings” made by Aboriginal people in Australia’s western deserts, these works from northeast Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory—also patterned, abstract, occasionally figurative, but visually very different—have had much less exposure. “Madayin” is the first major show devoted to them outside Australia, and is rightly proclaimed by Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art as the “most important exhibition of Aboriginal Australian art mounted in the western hemisphere in over 30 years.”

Nearly 90 works, painted on the inside bark of eucalyptus trees, line the galleries, grouped by each of the 16 clans represented here. As the wall texts explain, the artists are from the Yolngu people, and their paintings are considered to be family, part of a kinship system called gurrutu and linked by raki, which connects the land, sea, plants and all creatures. Within the Yolngu relational system are two complementary groups, called moieties, and people must marry someone from the other group. When they make art, each clan uses its own, distinct miny’tji, the design traditions that go back many millennia and that are deemed Madayin—both sacred and beautiful.

Perplexed? Don’t worry. While these and other concepts are critical to Yolngu art, the curators offer help. Noting that they are sharing the paintings to provide an understanding of their world, Wukun Wanambi—a recently deceased artist who was part of the exhibition’s large curatorial team—says in the opening wall text, “Like the surface of the water, beneath is an ocean of knowledge. We can only show you the surface.”

The surface is spectacular. Ranging from 19 inches to 12 feet tall, these vertical paintings are rendered almost entirely in natural shades of white, ocher, gray, maroon, beige and black. Their fascinating designs draw in viewers, and their meanings—as inscrutable as they may be—cause observers to wonder and to linger.

At the simplest level, “Diamond” (2018) by Wurrandan Marawili depicts a dominating diamond created from small diamonds and, within them, tinier diamonds, arranged in lines and curves in a pattern that seems random. The motif is intended to analogize the infinite layers of meaning in the rhomboid form, which often has sacred connotations. But it’s probably not that simple.

“Dugong at Baraltja and Yathikpa” (2017) by a fellow “Madarrpa” member, Napuwarri Marawili, similarly confounds. To Western eyes, it’s an appealing abstraction confected from grays, tans and white—swirls, diamonds and curved lines that suggest nature. But as the label explains, it’s actually a style of painting known as buwayak that hides figurative elements beneath traditional designs, with nary a clue for outsiders. When the initiated view “Dugong at Baraltja and Yathikpa,” they will see 34 hunters of dugong, the marine animals that live in nearby seas.

It might be frustrating to fail to see these stories if their designs weren’t so alluring. “Fish Trap at Gängan” (1996) by Gawirrin Gumana and “Fire Story” (1969) by Wakuthi Marawili swarm with fish, ducks, tortoises and snakes, surrounded by rushing waters. “Naypinya” (1963) by Mithinari Gurruwiwi shows a speckled mother snake and her snakelets splashing in the water. “Rainforest I” (2017) by Mulkun Wirrpanda goes into the dense wilds to portray the edible flora that have always sustained the Yolngu.

Two beautiful works by Naminapu Maymuru-White gleam and pulsate with diamond-shaped stars. Both are titled “The Milky Way,” which refers to the galaxy as well as to a river in Arnhem Land. In one (2003), the stars occupy a central, wavy band that resembles a river, with cross-hatched borders and angled branches flowing to the bark’s edges. Ms. Maymuru-White’s kin know the celestial Milky Way as the place to which souls ascend upon death, joining other creatures and manifesting as stars. Thus this work reflects on death and spirituality.

Her other “Milky Way” (2019) is an all-over design, with large and small stars set against light and dark bands of gray, which might be the night sky or maybe the river, that convey the depth of the universe (or the river).

Attentive visitors to this exhibition may notice that the creativity on view seems to come in bursts—in the ’60s, the mid-’90s, the late aughts. But the dates are misleading. In each of those periods, the Yolngu’s rights to their ancestral lands were especially endangered, by mining interests, assimilation policies, sea-right claims or war. Believing that their art is the most powerful way to document that they have lived on their land since the dawn of creation, they chose to show it and sell it to Westerners to disseminate that message, and the Yolngu curators had those contentious times in mind. Henry Skerritt, curator at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, which organized “Madayin” with the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala, said he watched ruefully as certain works were weeded out because of their dates.

It’s hard to imagine more captivating works. Such revelatory exhibitions deserve to travel, and fortunately this one begins a nationwide tour after its time at the Hood. Watch for it; it’s enthralling.

Finding A Path to Keep Stories Alive, in The Australian

August 22, 2022 | Amos Aikman

An ambitious Indigenous exhibition is about to be shared

You could say it began five years ago, although the stories of Yolngu culture go so far back that it’s hard to find a beginning, and they certainly show no signs of an end. Waka Mununggurr was on a beach at Yilpara in Arnhem Land with several other leaders. All are custodians of generations of cultural knowledge. They were discussing how to share some of that via one of the most ambitious in years.

The show, called Madayin, covers eight decades of work from the remote region around Yirrkala, about 650km east of Darwin, and will tour the US soon. The term Madayin lies somewhere on the compass between law, beauty and moral virtue.

Suddenly, Mununggurr stood up and started to sing. He commanded that five of the oldest bark paintings in Australia, held in Melbourne University’s Donald Thomson collection, become part of the travelling show.

And so began the painstaking process of consultation, preparation and legal reform required to allow the works collected in the 1930s and 1940s to leave Australia temporarily and join the first international exhibition led entirely by Yolngu curators.

“I feel it’s really good, because it’s sharing the knowledge with the wider world so that Yolngu can be recognised, so you and us, Balanda and Yolngu can be recognised and make a reconciliation,” Mununggurr says.

“Bark needs people” is a Yolngu phrase that may not automatically resonate with Western ears. It means bark paintings occupy a place in the Yolngu cultural tapestry but cannot be understood on their own. They need ceremony and song to breathe.

In a shed at Tullamarine Airport this week, Mununggurr and three other Yolngu painted themselves and sang to the barks to make them safe to leave the country. Two Wirrpanda men joined Mununggurr and Djimbala Ngurruwuthun, who are both descendants of Wonggu Mununggurr, one of the artists.

“To see these works for the first time, and to see the patterns of my clan and the patterns I now paint is a strong reminder of continuity and unbroken identity,” says Bingurr Wirrpanda.

Bandarr Wirrpanda says that works are “older than me, but through seeing them, I can see me and my people.” “I can feel the strength of my clan and the patterns we paint, sing and dance,” he says. “I feel so proud.”

Henry Skerritt, curator of the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection and one of those behind Madayin, says every step of the show’s design has been guided by Yolngu curators and collaborators.

“It is an amazing thing to walk into a major American museum like the Hood, and to immediately see a wall of Indigenous Australian language, to hear Indigenous song, and see the works arranged in a way that makes sense to their creators,” he says.

“This process has shown us an important lesson in listening: if you want to produce something really powerful, that gets down to the deep, extraordinary significance of the work, you need to hand control to those who know it best – and that is the Indigenous people themselves.”

Jamie Powell, Indigenous art curator at the Hood Museum in New Hampshire, where Madayin opens on September 3, says it will be “an exciting moment for US audiences to learn about an important part of global art history.”

Donald Thomson was an anthropologist who worked in Arnhem Land and was involved, with Wongguu Mununggurr and others, in defending Australia during World War II.

Melbourne University academic Marcia Langton says the Donald Thomson collection “represents a unique cultural resource… of national and international distinction.”

Category: Reviews