Nici Cumpston OAM, an artist, curator and writer specialising in Australian Indigenous art will be the next director of the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. An international committee of faculty, staff and volunteer leaders selected her to succeed founding director Margo Smith AM upon Smith’s retirement in May after 27 years of service.

Cumpston is of Baarkandji, Afghan, English and Irish heritage, a descendant of the Baarka/Darling River people of northwestern New South Wales. She has served as the inaugural curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia since 2008, and in that role, she was the founding artistic director of the internationally renowned Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art which began with BHP’s inestimable support in 2014.

Tarnanthi has become the pre-eminent First Nations art festival, both inside the AGSA and around Adelaide, where the annual Art Fair is cost-free to its remote art centre participants. Following on from the brief WA Indigenous Art Awards, Tarnanthi offers communities and individual artists a commission to create a group of works, while the longer-running NATSIAAs in Darwin reward only a single artwork with a prize in various categories. A catalogue each second year completes the achievement.

Cumpston is familiar with UVA, and they with her. For, in Spring 2014, she spent a month as an artist-in-residence at the University. She displayed her works – which are typically hand-coloured photographic representations of her tribal river system – and presented lectures to UVA and community groups, including talks about how fine art can raise awareness of environmental destruction and degradation.  Cumpston uses images of tree engravings and ring trees to act as signifiers of the Ancestors that once lived in and created the Country, and of food and water sources that ensured survival.

“I see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to build on the work I have been doing for the past 17 years at the Art Gallery of South Australia,” Cumpston commented. “I am excited about continuing the relationships I have built with artists and their communities of supporters across Australia and to now be in a position where we can showcase their work to international audiences in the U.S. and beyond”.

For the Kluhe-Ruhe is developing and increasing reputation for taking First Nations art beyond its Virginia home.
Its Art Collection, which includes more than 3,600 artworks, is the only one in a museum outside Australia dedicated to the exhibition and study of Indigenous Australian art. Edward Ruhe began building the collection, mainly of barks in 1965, purchasing them directly from artists, community art centres and early Aboriginal art dealers. John W. Kluge acquired Ruhe’s collection in 1993 to supplement his own large and growing collection of contemporary First Nations artworks. Kluge donated the complete collection to the University of Virginia in 1997, where it is available for exhibition, scholarly research and study.

Margo Smith Boles, as she was then known, began working with media magnate John W. Kluge’s private collection of Indigenous Australian art in 1995 while a graduate student in Anthropology at the UVA. Prof. Howard Morphy mentored her and together they convinced Kluge to donate his collection to UVA in 1997. The Museum opened to the public in a historic house off the campus in 1999 with Smith as the founding director. In 2016, Kluge-Ruhe received funding from the Mellon Foundation to hire Australian curator Henry Skerritt, which was a turning point for the museum, says Smith, who had previously done it all – managing the museum and acting as curator while also teaching undergraduate courses. With Skerritt’s experience of curating touring exhibitions in the US for Dennis Scholl, Kluge-Ruhe could take on significant projects such as the magnificent Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Paintings from Yirrkala. That actually began to build as part of Cumpston’s Tarnanthi Festival 2019, before travelling across the US from 2022 to 2025, completing its tour at the Asia Society in New York. Earlier, the Kluge organised the most complete two-part celebration for the 50th anniversary of Papunya Tula Artists, Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu (Past & Present Together). Amazingly, no Australian institution bothered!

Smith has also been part of a team working on a Center for the Arts at UVA, which is envisioned as the future home of Kluge-Ruhe and The Fralin Museum of Art, as well as the Departments of Music and Dance and a Performing Arts Center. Smith will happily relinquish this project to Cumpston, who, she says, can “take Kluge-Ruhe to the next level and beyond!”.

Over the 17 years of her tenure with AGSA, Cumpston has grown the collection of works by First Nations artists by more than 1000 pieces, and has contributed to the curation of 16 major exhibitions. Among the highlights were Riverland (2015) co-curating the first major survey of master Ngarrindjeri weaver, Yvonne Koolmatrie; John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new (2018), a major survey co-presented with Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Naomi Hobson : An Adolescent Wonderland (2020), which toured to Musée National de la Photographie in Morocco. A project that demonstrates Cumpston’s ability to bridge communities and institutions has been Kuḻaṯa Tjuṯa (Many Spears), which was part of Tarnanthi 2020, and became its first international offering, travelling to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, and later the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Le Havre. It was accompanied by a trilingual publication in Pitjantjatjara, English and French explaining the artwork’s origin in a major effort by senior Desert men to engage their wayward youth through the warlike pastime of making hunting spears.

Meanwhile, the Kluge is currently showing Milpa — a series of stop-motion animation films named after the Anangu people’s traditional practice of sand drawing, a storytelling medium in Desert peoples’ life. Coming from the community of Tjuntjuntjara in Western Australia, the project highlights the wide creative variety possible, even in the most remote communities via such culturally significant work by Spinifex artists.  Could it be a match for the Oscar nomination of Adam Elliot’s stop-motion feature, Memoir of a Snail?