The remarkable American partnership of Bob Kaplan and Margaret Levi continues to work miracles in the promotion of our First Nations art across America. They already have relations with their local Seattle Museum; now they’ve cast their net wider to Nevada. They’ve also commissioned the gift of a major work from Yirrkala’s master of Yolŋu industrial art, Gunybi Ganambarr, and it comes with a marvellous film that covers much of his culture as well revealing his personality. I hope to provide a link below.

At the Nevada Museum of Art – which was introduced to Aboriginal art by another US collector, Dennis Scholl who toured three different exhibitions to Reno – they’re now showing Eternal Signs featuring some of the seventy works by artists from across Australia’s diverse Indigenous communities donated by Kaplan and Levi. Calling it a landmark exhibition, rather oddly it now sits with the Museum’s Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Art of the Greater West Collection. Bob Kaplan and Margaret Levi have been acquiring work since the early 1990s, building one of the most esteemed collections of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists in the United States. In 2023, Kaplan and Levi gave the Nevada Museum of Art seventy of these works, and most are now being shown in public for the first time.

The Museum justifies their exhibition title on the grounds that contemporary First Nations works of art reveal what has been referred to as an “eternal present.” For their makers’ lives continue to be linked to ancient knowledge and diverse customs, which permeate their art forms and become eternal sign systems that evolve in the present.

This momentous gift includes contemporary works from the northern region of Arnhemland (Yirrkala and Maningrida), from the Central Desert sites of Utopia, Kintore and Papunya, and from areas further south in the Anangu Pitjanjatjarra Lands (APY). It involves the work of more than fifty contemporary artists including legends such as Darby Jampjinpa Ross, Ginger Riley, Polly Napangardi Watson, Gloria Petyarre, George Ward Tjungurrayi, and Paddy Fordham Wainburranga, and artists still working but recognised on an international stage, such as Gunybi Ganambarr and Djambawa Marawlli.

In 2012, the Museum came up with an interesting definition of the Greater West as a “super region” bounded from Alaska to Patagonia and from Australia to the United States’ intermountain West. This is a geography of frontiers characterised by large expanses of open land, enormous natural resources, diverse Indigenous peoples, colonisation, and the conflicts that inevitably arise when all four of those factors exist in the same place at the same time.

In New York, the fabled Metropolitan Museum has recently opened its significant new Michael Rockefeller Indigenous art galleries covering not only that Greater West region but Africa as well. Suiting the moment, the Kaplan Levi team offered the Met the possibility of a commission to sit in these galleries from Gunybi Ganambarr to add to nine works already donated. This was accepted and arranged with the artist. The work will go on show with a rehang next year and comes with “a little film” shot in Arnhemland, which was shown by Met curator Maia Nuku at a MET symposium that was held before the opening of Madayin, the big Buku Larrnggay exhibition from Yirrkala at the Asia Society. It was hailed as “ravishing” by the NY Times and closed in January after 30 months of touring from the Kluge Ruhe Museum.

Here’s the link to the Gunybi film:

But of course Sydney will soon get its chance to lasciviate in Yolŋu power at the Art Gallery of NSW, which also offers eight decades of art-making designed to explain a complex culture to non-Indigenous simpletons.