Women Artists and 20th Century Movements

Introduction

Twentieth-century women artists worked amid momentous shifts as people around the world struggled to overthrow European colonial rule, gain civil rights, and achieve gender equality. Many women artists played vital roles in anticolonial and postcolonial movements that helped to forge new national cultural identities. Indigenous women artists—many of whom remain under colonial rule today—revived, reimagined, and sometimes rejected aesthetic forms that were meaningful to their communities.

The expansion of capitalist art markets led to opportunities for women artists to make a living through their creations, yet also opened the door to new varieties of appropriation and exploitation.¹ The demands of capitalism meant many artists commodified their own artistic traditions, leading to the loss or transformation of some cultural elements. Yet along the way, they innovated, incorporating aesthetic changes to the inherited forms.

This feature focuses on the work of a handful of 20th century women artists working in settler-colonial or postcolonial contexts. It includes Margaret Tafoya and other contemporary Pueblo women potters; Lygia Pape in Brazil; Kamala Ibrahim Ishag in Sudan; and women from the Aboriginal art movement, including Kathleen Petyarre.

All of these artists made work that engaged in some way with land, though from different points of view. Some use the earth as their medium, as in Pueblo potters’ use of local clay and natural pigments. Others represent women’s connection to local plant and spirit life, such as Ishag’s paintings of zār ceremonies. The women of the Aboriginal Art Movement draw on Indigenous Australian women’s spiritual knowledge, rooted in the land, to make striking contemporary art. Pape, on the other hand, created works that included elements from Indigenous Brazilian artistic traditions and the cityscapes of the urban poor as part of a largely elite movement attempting to forge a Modernism that diverged from European standard bearers.

Many of the resulting artworks are deeply rooted in a particular place, yet they also become commodities that circulate internationally—a generative and often fraught transformation. Taken together, these artists’ work illuminate some of the many creative, often contentious, ways 20th century artists drew on, revived, and transformed local aesthetic forms in relationship with global art movements and markets.

Pueblo Potters: Sara Fina and Margaret Tafoya, Lucy Lewis, and Gladys Paquin

Ancestors of the Pueblo peoples, in what is now the Southwestern United States, have been making pottery for more than a thousand years. Pueblo peoples of all genders gathered clay from the local desert, while women primarily made the pots. Ceramicists traditionally shaped their works by hand.² They fired groups of pots in pits of burning wood or dung.³ Communities used different words to refer to pots, such as K’yabokya de’ele, “water jar,” among Halona:wa, known as Zuni, people.⁴ These pots, now broadly called ollas after the Spanish word for ceramic jar, were primarily functional—used for storage, especially of precious water and corn—rather than decorative. Yet creators carefully finished them with designs evoking the elements, local flora and fauna, and stories.⁵

By the early 20th century, Euro-American tourists and collectors increasingly traveled to the Pueblo region. Many collectors took historical objects without consent. Yet some Pueblo potters saw this outside interest as a way to earn a livelihood.⁶ Potters began making ceramics for the tourist and art markets, elaborating on the designs they saw in ancestral pots.⁷ According to Antonio Chavarria, who is Tewa and Curator of Ethnology at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, market interest also resulted in pressure on potters to eliminate accidents of the creative process, that otherwise serve to remind the user of the maker’s human touch: “a shaky line, a scratch, a crack in the slip.”⁸

In the 1920s, many Pueblo artists began signing their work to mark their individual artistry.⁹ By the late 20th century, as the non-Native American market for Native-made objects grew, collectors and curators came to view Pueblo pottery as art rather than craft.¹⁰ Museums—including the Brooklyn Museum, one of Curationist’s partners—purchased late 20th century pots by Pueblo potters. The pots included in this feature are almost all from the Brooklyn Museum and were largely made and purchased in the late 20th century. In exhibitions such as the Brooklyn Museum’s 2007-2008 An Art of Our Own, curators acknowledged individual Pueblo women potters as artists in dialogue with both Pueblo history and diverse contemporary ceramic art movements.¹¹

Recent exhibitions have increasingly centered Pueblo people as both artists and curators. For example, the Pueblo Pottery Collective, a group of 60 elders, artists, and culture workers from 22 different communities, curated Grounded in Clay, which appeared at The Met and other venues in 2023. Community members have a variety of opinions on museums’ designation of historic and contemporary Pueblo pots as art. “Historic pottery, like the storage jar, are not art,” said Brian D. Vallo, a Haak’u/Pueblo of Acoma artist, culture worker, and former governor.¹² “But there’s an incredible artistic talent that goes into creating these pieces.”¹³ Chavarria summarized his community’s relationship to ceramics: “Pottery is family.”¹⁴

Many Pueblo women potters today consider themselves contemporary artists who dialogue with the past and innovate on ceramic traditions. Pueblo potters continue to pass down creative knowledge within their families and communities. Women, men, and two-spirit people all make pottery, and contemporary potters often particularly pay homage to women elders.¹⁵ Potters use distinctive motifs and techniques often tied to their family or region, though they may borrow motifs from other Pueblos with permission.¹⁶ Others incorporate surprising and playful new designs, such as the dinosaur figurines of Damacia Cordero, from Cochiti Pueblo.¹⁷

Pueblo potters each have their own understanding of what it means to innovate artistically while retaining integrity to their sense of tradition. For example, some potters now use electric kilns to fire their works, while others choose to continue manure or wood firing.¹⁸ Similarly, writes Chavarria, some potters have responded to shortages of local clay due to land enclosures by combining commercial and local materials.¹⁹

Sara Fina and Margaret Tafoya

Sara Fina and Margaret Tafoya were a Tewa mother and daughter from Kha’p’o Owingeh, also known as Santa Clara Pueblo, in New Mexico. Sara Fina, born in 1863, became renowned by the end of her lifetime for her extraordinarily large coiled pots.²⁰ She was also known for her signature bear claw design. "It is a good luck symbol," her daughter Margaret, who also used the symbol, later said. "The bear always knows where the water is."²¹

Margaret, herself an esteemed Santa Clara potter, writes that she remembered her mother making pottery while her father, Geronimo, farmed.²² While Sara Fina began by making pottery for home use, by the turn of the century she was selling her work, and by the end of her life signing it—perhaps signaling her changing sense of identity as an artist.²³

Margaret Tafoya recalls Sara Fina tossing her and her sisters small pieces of clay so they could work alongside their mother. Margaret sold her first pot to a Santa Fe dealer when she was a young girl. As an adult, she was one of the only potters to make coiled vessels as large as her mother’s—over 30 inches high. She also specialized in black-on-black ware, and she incorporated bear paw, kiva step, mountain, buffalo horn, and clear sky motifs.²⁴

Margaret rejected the potter’s wheel, used only clay dug from Santa Clara pueblo, and continued firing her pots in manure fires rather than electric kilns to give them their distinct black sheen.²⁵ She supported her ten surviving children with her work—and many of her descendants became renowned potters.²⁶ “I have dressed my children with clay,” Tafoya said.²⁷

Lucy Lewis

Born around 1890, Lucy Lewis grew up in Haak’u, called Acoma Pueblo by the U.S. government and broader public, in the tiny village of Sky City, named for its perch atop a mesa in what was then the U.S. territory of New Mexico.²⁸ Lewis learned to make pottery from her aunt. Because of Acoma’s remote location, women in the community continued making pottery largely for utilitarian purposes, including to haul water, well into the twentieth century.²⁹

Lewis first sold her pottery at roadside stands. She became known in the art market when she entered an art competition in 1950, at around age 60, and won the first of many awards. Lewis spent the rest of her life making, selling, and exhibiting her pottery.³⁰

Lewis’s work tends to feature white-slipped ollas with elaborate black geometric designs. She was inspired by the pottery shards she collected in the desert, made by her ancient ancestors. Some scholars and collectors regard her use of hand-painted geometric designs as a revival of the ancient Mimbres ware.³¹ Acoma potters often grind ancient pottery shards to temper their clay, an act evoking ancestral continuity.³² As one of the first Acoma women to sign her pots, Lewis played a significant role in shaping the emerging Native art market.³³

Gladys Paquin

Gladys Paquin, of K'awaika, known as Laguna Pueblo, was born in 1934. She drew on motifs from both her Laguna and Zuni heritage to help lead the resurgence of Acoma pottery that begin in the 1970s and 80s. At that time, increasingly available and inexpensive industrial household goods had replaced handmade ollas in Laguna. The tourist market for Pueblo art, which had been gaining strength throughout the 20th century, was faltering due to an influx of mass-produced souvenirs. In the midst of these forces, Paquin and other potters, including Evelyn and Lee Ann Cheromiah, revived Laguna pottery.³⁴

Paquin researched ancestral Pueblo ollas in books and museum collections, then created her own interpretations. She referred to herself as a “contemporary traditionalist.”³⁵ Paquin handmade coiled ollas that she coated in red or white slip and decorated with designs in black, red, and white. She used a stone to polish her jars to give the surface “brightness and softness.”³⁶

Neo-Concrete and Beyond: Lygia Pape

Lygia Pape was a Euro-Brazilian artist whose career spanned much of the 20th century. Pape was originally associated with Grupo Frente in the 1950s, a collective inspired by the Concrete art movement. Pape and collaborators developed an artistic outlook they dubbed Neo-Concrete art, which emphasized participatory sensory engagement between artist, object, and audience.³⁷ For example, in Pape’s “Tecelares” (“weaving”) series, she created woodblock prints on handmade paper, revealing the subtle whorls of woodgrain. In doing so, she turned geometric forms into organic “weavings,” which evoked women’s textile arts.³⁸ Pape went on to work in bookmaking, installation, performance, and video.

The Met and the Art Institute Chicago, Curationist partner collections, both have multiple works by Pape, but since they are under copyright, they are not available through the Curationist platform.

Pape’s incorporation of themes and symbols from Indigenous Brazilian cultures, as well as her performances in favelas, are part of a contested history of modernist Euro-Brazilian artists taking up (or, to some, appropriating) themes related to Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous experience. In her videos and performances from the 1960s and 1970s, Pape expanded the neo-Concrete emphasis on participatory art by incorporating the urban space of Rio de Janeiro in public works that implicitly explored the class and race divisions in urban public space. This particularly included favelas, or informal housing developments of the urban poor.

Most famous among these works is the 1968 Divisor. Pape had originally conceptualized the piece as a gallery performance in which participants would collectively wear a large white sheet with holes for their heads. Instead, she brought the sheet to a favela. She filmed favela children as they played with the sheet, eventually wearing it in what appears, in the finished documentation, to be a spontaneous performance.³⁹ At a time when Brazil’s military dictatorship had banned public protest, the work was a way to create collectivity in public space. Pape would herself later experience the regime’s brutality when, in 1973, the government accused her of harboring dissidents, arrested her, tortured her, and incarcerated her for three months.⁴⁰

Some scholars have critiqued Pape’s engagement with favelas and Afro-Brazilian culture. Adrian Anagnost, for example, argues that some of Pape’s images reinforced a “stereotypical mode of Afro-Brazilian culture.”⁴¹ Chloe Wyma argues that Pape’s celebration of the informal architecture of favelas “risks a queasy romanticisation of poverty.”⁴² In contrast, others, such as Julia Kershaw, argue that Pape’s work in favelas importantly contested the dictatorship’s favela eradication policy and emphasized the informal neighborhoods’ “innovative spatial syntax and scenes of everyday life.”⁴³

Pape’s work often incorporated flesh. In her 1967 Caixa de Formigas (Box of Ants), Pape created an acrylic container holding a mirror, a piece of raw meat, and live ants. On the container, around the raw meat, Pape wrote, “a gula ou a luxúria” (“gluttony or lust”). In her 1975 film Eat Me, mouths suck objects while voices repeat “a gula ou a luxúria” in the background. Sexualized screams are abruptly cut off by the sound of an advertisement at the film’s end, suggesting the objectification of desire within consumer culture.⁴⁴

Despite dealing with similar themes and media as many of her self-described feminist contemporaries, Pape explicitly stated she was not interested in “any ideological feminist discourse.”⁴⁵ Scholar Paulo Herkenhoff suggests that Latin American artists often fought to have their work recognized as universal rather than regional. Perhaps, he argues, Pape aspired to be designated as simply an “artist” rather than a “woman artist.”⁴⁶

Eat Me evokes the concept of anthropophagy, or cannibalism. One of the defining statements of Brazilian modernism, Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago,” uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Brazilian art and national identity. Early European colonizers in what is now Brazil wrote that the local Tupi people would kill and eat their enemies, including Europeans, as a way of imbibing the other’s strength.⁴⁷ In the context of European genocide against Indigenous South American peoples, the concept of anthropophagy suggested the desire to reverse the colonial narrative and consume the works and values of the so-called Old World to produce something uniquely Brazilian.⁴⁸

More recent scholars, including Afro-Brazilian scholars, have critiqued the predominantly white Brazilian cultural elite’s promotion of anthropophagy, arguing that it is a form of simultaneous erasure of Afro-Brazilians and fetishization of Indigenous peoples. Indeed, modernist proponents of anthropophagy frequently caricatured Afro-Brazilian people in exceedingly racist terms.⁴⁹ Similarly, white Brazilian artists frequently claimed Indigenous cultural symbols while neglecting to take accountability for the Euro-Brazilian genocide of Indigenous people.⁵⁰ Despite claims of egalitarian racial democracy, the Brazilian elite art world remains disproportionately white.⁵¹

These historical tensions emerge within Pape’s work drawing on Indigenous histories. In one of her last works, 2000’s “Tupinambá” series, Pape used red feathers to evoke the powerful Tupinambá red feather capes, many of which Europeans had stolen. She coated daily objects—guitars, chairs, spheres—with the feathers. Bloodied and light-skinned feet and breasts (made of plastic) emerge from the feathers as though the animate capes had eaten Europeans.⁵² “Pape relishes rendering an Indigenous dissection and desecration of Western bodies and values, emphasizing that there can be no synthesis without the violent unraveling of colonizers and their values,” wrote critic Allison Noelle Conner in a 2021 review of the work.⁵³

There are only eleven historical Tupinambá capes art historians know to exist today. Until recently, European museum collections, including the National Museum of Denmark, held all of them. In 2023, after negotiations between the Brazilian and Danish governments and Tupinambá leaders, Denmark repatriated one of the five capes in their collection to Brazil's National Museum.⁵⁴ “May the mantle bring new strength to the Tupinambás of Olivença!” said Maria Valdelice Amaral de Jesus, a Tupinambá leader. leader. She expressed hope that the Brazilian government would recognize the group's land rights.⁵⁵

Artist and culture worker Glicèria Tupinambá visited the Danish National Museum during the repatriation process. In recent years, she has also made contemporary Tupinambá feather capes, which she refers to as women’s capes that specifically evoke the experience of female ancestors. She collaborated with Fernanda Liberti on a photo series showing Glicèria and community members wearing the capes in locations in the state of Bahia that are meaningful to them. While Glicèria Tupinambá has exhibited the contemporary capes in art spaces, she says that she and her community understand the cape as more than an art object: “We see it as an ancestor,” she said.⁵⁶

Kamala Ibrahim Ishag and The Crystalists

In January 1976, a group of artists, led by Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, published a manifesto in the pages of Sudanese newspaper al-Ayyām. In their “Bayān al-Madrasa al-Krīstāliyya,” or “The Crystalist Manifesto,” the group envisioned a visual art centered around the metaphor of the crystal.⁵⁷ In the manifesto, Ishag and her collaborators offered a mystical, avant-garde, and liberal vision that referenced concepts like existentialism, Sufism, and subatomic theory. “Man himself is the endeavor and the subject of a crystal that extends endlessly within,” they wrote. “This is not an issue that can be contained within a simple quantity; but perhaps it can be contained within a teleological quantity, namely, pleasure.”⁵⁸

Born in Sudan in 1939, Ishag was one of the first women graduates of the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum, where she later became a professor. In the 1960s and 70s, the outlook of the Khartoum School formed the dominant strain of modern Sudanese art. Khartoum School artists included Ibrahim El-Salahi, who served senior roles in the government culture ministry, and Ishag herself before she broke away to form the Crystalists. Artists of the Khartoum School brought together local Sudanese and broader Islamic themes, and often incorporated Arabic calligraphy to craft a nationalist vision that celebrated Sudanese modernity.⁵⁹ The Khartoum school broadly reflected the early socialist and Pan-Arabist platform of the ruling Gaafar Muhammad an-Nimeiry government.

The Al-Ayyām newspaper was state-run, but, according to artist and al-Ayyām editor Hassan M. Musa, the culture page provided a narrow space where artists could debate politics in the guise of aesthetics. When the Crystalists published their manifesto in the pages of al-Ayyām, their critique of the Khartoum school was thus effectively a subtle critique of the government.⁶⁰

The Khartoum school focused on the written word and the public sphere of class struggle.⁶¹ In contrast, Ishag developed the "Crystalist Manifesto" partially because “its effort to instantiate an alternative kind of interior knowledge” enabled the serious consideration of women’s interiority, writes art historian Anneka Lenssen.⁶² Ishag’s work frequently expressed the emotional experience of women’s daily lives: their intimacies, their pain and protest, their spaces of community, and their connection to Sudanese spirit and plant life. Her work, including the way she paints human figures and her use of an earthy palette, is also influenced by her studies of prehistoric, Kushite, and medieval Nubian Christian art.⁶³ Ishag painted in oils on canvas, or in acrylic on dried calabashes. Part of a Film (c. 1969-1972) is a painting on masonite, housed in the collection of the National Museum of African Art.

In Dinner Table with Embroidered Cloth, from 1974, Ishag depicts women joined around a table. As in many of Ishag’s paintings, the women are together, yet their faces are distorted in pleasure or pain. “My story is driven by precise and clear observation: faces show up in my work, women's faces, often enshrined in what may be seen as square cubes or crystallized forms,” Ishag has said.⁶⁴

Ishag has frequently painted Zār ceremonies, women’s spiritual healing rituals that include spirit possession and may induce trances.⁶⁵ This connects to the Crystalists’ early interest in diverse mystical traditions, particularly the works of William Blake.⁶⁶ In Ishag’s 2015 Procession (Zaar), as in many of Ishag’s paintings, the women appear as separate leaves, connected by vine-like lines that root them in a collective life force. Tree imagery is central to Ishag’s more recent work. “I always say I’m like a tree,” she told curator Michelle Mlati in a 2023 interview. “Plants and people, they came from one source.”⁶⁷

In Ishag’s 2022 Blues for the Martyrs, round faces cluster like bubbles floating amid a tangle of green weeds in blue water. The painting commemorates those killed in the 2019 Khartoum Massacre, in which the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces murdered over 100 protestors at a sit-in, throwing many of their bodies into the Nile.⁶⁸ The figures appear isolated in their bubbles, a variation on Ishag’s crystal cubes, yet here they have the fertile appearance of eggs, suggesting rebirth. While the green vines appear to strangle the figures, they also tether them to life.

While Ishag studied in the U.K. in her 20s, the Global North art world largely didn’t acknowledge the impact of the Crystalists until art historian Salah M. Hassan included Ishag’s work in the Sudan section of the 1995 U.K. exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa.⁶⁹

Today, even as Ishag’s work enjoys increasing international recognition, political circumstances have decimated the Sudanese contemporary art world. The Sudanese War, which began in 2023, has displaced thousands of people from Ishag’s home city of Khartoum. This includes dozens of artists from Khartoum’s contemporary art scene, many of whom have taken refuge in nearby countries.⁷⁰ Fleeing the violence, Ishag relocated to Sharjah in May 2023. Some of her work was already in Sharjah; she had to leave many other pieces, as well as her beloved plants, in Sudan. Of the experience of exile, Ishag says, “It’s like a cutting off of roots. It feels like I have been cut to pieces now.” Of the paintings she left behind, Ishag told Michelle Mlati, “I think about them every minute of the day.”⁷¹

Painting Country: Women of The Aboriginal Art Movement

In 1978, in Utopia, Australia, Aboriginal women began practicing batik to generate income. The group included artist Kathleen Petyarre, who would go on to be renowned in what is now called the Aboriginal Art Movement.⁷² Here, we’ll focus on three women artists from the Aboriginal Art Movement who currently have work in The Met, specifically Kathleen Petyarre, Doreen Reid Nakamurra, and Lena Nyadbi.

Utopia is the settler name for an area made up of five different places with the Indigenous names Alhalpere, Rreltye, Thelye, Atarrkete, and Ingutanka.⁷³ Starting in the 1920s, white settlers began forcing the region’s Aboriginal peoples off their lands. In the 1970s, amid a broader movement of Aboriginal assertion, the Utopia community went to court to gain legal title to their land. Women in the community used their batik work to argue that the community could be economically independent on capitalist terms. (Of course, Aboriginal people had been independent of Western colonialism for millennia, and should need no proof to claim the Country that are and will always be theirs.) This helped them win the case.⁷⁴ The non-Indigenous art world quickly became interested in showing and acquiring the batiks, especially following the group’s 1981 exhibition at the Adelaide Art Festival. In 1988, the women began painting with acrylic on canvas.⁷⁵

The Utopia women joined a broader group of Aboriginal artists who had begun working in acrylics on canvas and wood in the 1970s. That movement began in 1971 at Papunya, initially with the collaboration of a Euro-Australian art teacher. As at Utopia, Euro-Australians had pushed Aboriginal people from the surrounding lands, causing many of them to leave their seasonal and cyclical movements to settle at Papunya.⁷⁶ This is part of the broader white genocide of Australian of Aboriginal peoples.⁷⁷ The Papunya painters, including renowned artist Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, formed an artists’ cooperative called Papunya Tula Artists, and their work soon gained local and international repute. Papunya Tula is now one of dozens of Indigenous-run art collectives.⁷⁸

When artists working within the contemporary Aboriginal Art movement paint, they recall, recite, and represent the Dreaming. Dreamings are often (but not always) age- and gender-specific, with women frequently painting Women’s Dreaming unique to their community and female kin. Certain kinds of knowledge may be restricted only to elder women or elder men. The Dreaming is an English-language word, invented by late-19th century settler anthropologists but adopted by Aboriginal Australians, designating a set of origin stories and the worldviews they embody across diverse Aboriginal Australian communities. It is an umbrella term that may be used to indicate diverse community-specific concepts: for example, Jukurrpa for Warlpiri-speakers and Altyerrenge or Altyerr for Arrerntic peoples.⁷⁹ According to Jeannie Herbert Nungarrayi, a Walpiri educator and artist, “The Jukurrpa is an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting with the natural environment.”⁸⁰

As part of the Dreaming, in ancestral time, powerful Creator Beings roamed the continent. Their stories—of hunting, fighting, ritual, and more—became the landscape itself, existing in an “everywhen” that is past, present, and future. Dreaming stories are rooted in Country, understood as physical, narrative, and spiritual landscapes, various aspects of which Aboriginal Australian individuals have customary rights to. According to Met curator of Oceanic art Maia Nuku, Country is “a personification of an idea; these are not empty concepts, but actual realities” of land and “ancestral time.”⁸¹

When Aboriginal artists began using techniques like batik dying and acrylic painting, they built on diverse, millennia-old artistic traditions including ancient rock art.⁸² Many Aboriginal Art Movement artists, such as Kathleen Petyarre, come from groups that create elaborate pigment designs on their bodies during ceremonies.⁸³ Bark is also a common medium, for example among people from Arnhem land.⁸⁴ Many Australian Aboriginal people, such as Arandic-speaking people from central Australia, also draw in the sand as an expressive medium.⁸⁵

As an extension of this tradition of working on the ground, many artists in the Aboriginal Art Movement paint their canvases on the ground in a large shared space.⁸⁶ While galleries and museums often exhibit the canvases on walls, some venues also show the paintings on the floor, such as the installation of Doreen Reid Nakamarra’s untitled at the 2008 Sydney Biennale.

By the late 20th century, collectors, curators, and critics across Australia, and the world, were deeply interested in Aboriginal women’s visually vibrant and spiritually significant paintings. Collectors likened what they saw to abstract expressionism, though others have pushed back against the comparison as Eurocentric.⁸⁷ Both painters and collectors valued the artists’ ability to create “dynamic resonance,” or shimmer—a visual, bodily, and spiritual quality that evokes the optical effects of rain, lightning, and natural materials.⁸⁸

Today, Aboriginal Art Movement artists paint for the market rather than for local use. The act of recalling and expressing these stories is equally if not more important to the painters than the finished product. “It's about ancestry and relationships, how art can help people cross thresholds into different realms, from past to present and on into the future, between life and death for example,” Maia Nuku explains, describing the broader social and spiritual function of Oceanic art. “These paintings give us the opportunity to think about our interconnectedness, our relationship with time, with our ancestors, and with the land.”⁸⁹

Kathleen Petyarre

Kathleen Petyarre was born around 1940 on Anmatyerr Country in what is now the Northern Territory. Called Kwementyaye by her family, Petyarre lived on Country with her community until the Australian government forced them into Utopia.

There, she started working in batik alongside other Utopia women in the early 1970s. Petyarre then transitioned to painting in acrylic on canvas. Multiple museums and galleries featured her work in solo shows before her death in 2018.⁹⁰ Many of her women relatives also became notable artists, including her aunt Emily Kame Kngwarreye and her sisters Gloria, Violet, Myrtle, and Jeanna Petyarre.⁹¹

According to Petyarre, her work is replete with memories of her childhood on Country. Petyarre inherited the rights to depict the Arnkerrth, or Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming, from her father and grandfather. She evokes this Dreaming in many of her works.⁹² In a 2004 interview with Christine Nicholls, Petyarre recalled, laughing, that as a young girl, she and her sister hid to watch older women paint their bodies to engage in ceremony. Upon discovery, they were scolded, as the ceremony was only for older women.⁹³

The Met houses two of Petyarre’s paintings. Both demonstrate Petyarre’s technique of using many tiny dots to create an overall kinetic visual effect of shimmer. In her 1999 Sandhills in Atnangkere Country, burnt orange points created wavy striations across a red field. In her 2000 Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming-Sand-Hill Country (after Hailstorm), dark lines extend across a white ground as though into the horizon, evoking the pathways of the Arnkerrth across the landscape.

In her 2008 Arnkerrth (Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming), a print housed in the British Museum, crossed lines emerge from flecks of rich rust and yellow. The dots seem to ripple before the viewer’s eyes.

Scholars have characterized Petyarre’s paintings as representing a kind of aerial “map” of the landscape which symbolizes the Dreaming. Others have argued that this characterization inappropriately reduces the Dreaming to traditional Western terms, in which art represents or symbolizes something else rather than being a form of embodied experience in and of itself.⁹⁴

Petyarre’s commentary on her own work suggests multiple layers of meaning and experience. Petyarre described her paintings from the early 2000s as “our Arnkerrth (Mountain Devil Lizard) body painting from the old days, when we would paint up our bodies and dance.”⁹⁵ Her paintings evoke the experience of “looking from the sky,” even as they remain grounded in the dancing bodies of elder women: “It’s still body painting, still ceremony, even looking from the sky, still dancing.”⁹⁶

While Petyarre shared insights about her work, the information she wouldn’t share with people outside of her community of women is equally important. Artists in the Aboriginal Art Movement have been careful to protect sacred knowledge intended only for specific groups. In their works, painters often use visual techniques like dotting to conceal forms and information that might reveal too much about ceremonies to outsiders. When Nicholls asked Petyarre about the significance of fertility imagery and women’s breasts in her work, for example, Petyarre agreed these elements were key, but emphasized their secrecy: “True, it’s true, but I won’t say more. Not a word. Secret.”⁹⁷

Taking a cue from Petyarre’s statements, scholars like Rosalyn Diprose and Jennifer Biddle urge viewers to consider the artist’s work as not just representing but catalyzing an embodied experience of Country in the viewer.⁹⁸ As Biddle argues, the paintings produce a “haptic, kinesthetic, tactile” sensation.⁹⁹ In this sense, Petyarre’s use of shimmer challenges the commodity status of works made for market, as the paintings actively invite the viewer into a relationship with Country that is felt and not merely witnessed.

Doreen Reid Nakamarra

Doreen Reid Nakamarra was born in the mid-1950s, in what is now called the Warburton ranges, on Pintupi/Ngaatjatjarra Country. She and her family lived on Country when she was a child. Later, they moved between government settlements. Nakamarra and her husband, noted Papunya Tula artist and community healer Dr. George ‘Tjampu’ Tjapaltjarri, eventually lived close to his Country at Kiwirrkurra. Nakamarra began painting alongside Tjapaltjarri.¹⁰⁰

Nakamarra was part of a small group of Papunya Tula women who started creating their own canvases in the late 1990s. Until then, Papunya Tula artists had been mostly men. The women artists brought women’s Dreaming to the canvases, catalyzing a different experience of Country for viewers. Nakamarra continued painting after her husband died in 2005, and her work from the early 2000s has been featured in exhibitions both in Australia and abroad.¹⁰¹

The Met houses one of Nakamarra’s paintings, Marrapinti. In the work, hatched ochre lines, like turgid cells, emerge from a gray background ringed with red. Nakamarra often depicted a Dreaming concerning a journey of ancestral women from Marrapinti Rock Hole, a key water source near what is now called Western Australia’s Pollock Hills. According to Brenda Croft, a scholar from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra Peoples, Nakamarra’s canvases are renowned for their ability to “hypnotize with their apparently shifting perspective, using the most sparing of colors.”¹⁰² For example, the black and white lines of a mesmerizing 2007 work, Marrapinti Rockhole, currently housed in the Seattle Museum of Art, produce an intense visual effect of motion even when reproduced on a computer screen.

In her work, Nakamarra told scholar Elizabeth Grosz in 2009, Nakamarra evokes her husband’s Pintupi Country through the lens of women’s strength, fortitude, their knowledge and their capacity “to survive and thrive.”¹⁰³ Writing in the Native American context, Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor has referred to this constellation of qualities as “survivance” to emphasize the vitality of Indigenous life, while Blackfeet Nation descendent scholar Dianne Baumann coined the term “thrivance” to go beyond survival and embrace Indigenous people’s contemporary wellbeing and contributions.¹⁰⁴

In 2009, Nakamarra traveled to New York City to participate in the exhibition Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja: We Are Here Sharing Our Dreaming, which featured one of her paintings. As Nakamarra’s friend and collaborator, Arrernte and Kalkadoon curator Hetti Perkins, writes, “I will long remember walking through Washington Square holding hands with Nakamarra as together we marveled at being in the Big Apple.” Tragically, shortly after returning to Australia that year, Nakamarra passed away after being hospitalized for pneumonia. Perkins memorializes Nakamarra as “an artist who had challenged the tightly held criteria of contemporary art practice with her persuasively beautiful conceptualizations of the contours of her husband’s country,” as well as “a person of spirited gentleness, dignity, and humor.”¹⁰⁵

Lena Nyadbi

Gija artist Lena Nyadbi was born in the 1930s at Warnmarnjooloogoon Lagoon. She grew up in Thildoowam Country. There, under a white supremacist legal regime that permitted profound economic exploitation of Aboriginal people, settler Australians effectively indentured a young Nyadbi. In the early 1970s, the settler government dammed the nearby Ord River, flooding Nyadbi’s Country. She would later recall memories of dispossession from that time.¹⁰⁶

Nyadbi began painting in the 1990s at the Gija-owned Warmun Art Center, with which she remained affiliated for the rest of her life. She largely worked with natural ochres and coal blacks to depict two main Dreamings: Jimbirla and Dayiwool Lirlmim. Jimbirla are sharp stones, which people from Nyadbi’s father’s Country used to make spear tips.¹⁰⁷ The Met houses one of Nyadbi’s jimbirla works, Jimbala. The visually striking painting features alternating black and white marks that form shifting lines across the canvas. Or see Gimenbayin Cave, in the collection of the British Museum.

Dayiwool Lirlmim are barramundi scales. In the Barramundi Dreaming, the fish escaped from three ancestral women, her scales scattering across Gija Country as she fled. The barramundi’s lost scales turned into diamonds—which settler Australian mining companies subsequently mined, wreaking havoc on the wellbeing of local Country.¹⁰⁸ The area, Barramundi Gap, remains a sacred women’s place.

Nyadbi’s arguably most famous painting is Dayiwul Lirlmim (Barramundi Scales), named after the being it depicts. In 2013, the painting was reproduced on the roof of the Musée du Quai Branly, a large museum of Indigenous art in Paris.¹⁰⁹ Nyadbi had already contributed a work, Jimbirla and Gemerre, to one of the museum’s exterior walls. When Nyadbi stood on the Eiffel Tower’s observation deck to see her work unveiled, she cried. “Sorry,” she said to the Sydney Morning Herald, explaining her feelings. “Sorry.” Nyadbi felt pride, her niece Roseleen Park explained, but she also felt sadness: sadness at being so far away from home and sadness at what the mines had done to what she often called her “poor bugger Country.”¹¹⁰

Still, Park told the Herald, it was a good thing for people all over the world to have a chance to encounter Gija Dreaming. And, Nyadbi added, she was looking forward to going home and sharing her triumph with her community: “I saw my Dayiwul by the side of the river, ready to jump in the water,” she said.¹¹¹

Conclusion

This is the final installment in Curationist’s 7-part series on women artists. For the previous installment, see “Women Artists and Modernity.” For a guide to the series, see “Women Artists and the Museum.”