After 27 years as the director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Margo Smith AM has announced that she will retire in June next year.
Kluge-Ruhe is one of the most significant collections of Indigenous Australian art in the world with more than 3,600 artworks in its care. It is the centre for Indigenous Australian art in the United States and an exemplar of respectful and collaborative relationships with artists and knowledge holders.
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 University of Virginia (UVA). 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 in 1999 with Smith as the founding director.
The Edward L Ruhe Collection of Aboriginal barks, gathered since 1965, was added in 1993, after Ruhe’s death.
In 2016, Kluge-Ruhe received funding from the Mellon Foundation to hire Australian curator Henry Skerritt. This 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 for Dennis Scholl, Kluge-Ruhe could take on significant projects such as Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Paintings from Yirrkala, which is about to complete a serious American tour at the Asia Society New York.
Smith has also been part of a team working on a Center for the Arts, which is envisioned as the future home of Kluge-Ruhe and The Fralin Museum of Art, the Departments of Music and Dance and a Performing Arts Center on UVA Grounds. Smith will happily relinquish this project to a future director who, she says, can “take Kluge-Ruhe to the next level and beyond!”.
In considering her legacy, Smith is most proud of the opportunities Kluge-Ruhe has provided for Indigenous Australian artists and cultural practitioners. The museum has hosted the first experience of the US and international travel for many First Nations people. “Not only has this expanded their world views, but they have seen firsthand how their arts and cultures are received and the impact they can have on the world stage”.
For her service to Australia and the University of Virginia, Smith was made an honorary Member of the Order of Australia in 2015, and received the Thomas Jefferson Award for Service in 2023.
An international search for Kluge-Ruhe’s new Director is underway. Queries can be addressed to the search chair, Professor Douglas Fordham, fordham@virginia.edu.
Meanwhile, no doubt encouraged by Margo Smith, Gerald and Mary Reid Brunstrom have donated a collection of 33 artworks by Anmatyerre and Alyawarre artists from Utopia to the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. The Brunstrom gift substantially increases it’s representation of early artworks from Utopia.
This significant collection was amassed by Mary Brunstrom through the Austral Gallery, which she founded in St. Louis in 1988 and directed until it closed in 2000. Austral Gallery was among the first galleries to introduce work by contemporary Australian artists to audiences in the US.
Margo Smith recalls, “Mary worked tirelessly to place important First Nations Australian art in major museums and, through a number of innovative projects, to increase its visibility in the United States”.
A group of six acrylic paintings on 20 x 25 cms boards painted in 1989 by senior Utopia women, working side by side and sharing their paint pots, stand out as jewel-like images. One is by Emily Kngwarreye, anticipating future directions in theme and style that would come to characterise her now famous art. Among the first half dozen paintings that the artist produced, this diminutive piece is a significant addition to Kluge-Ruhe’s holdings of her works.
Most of Kluge’s collection came after 1990, so the earlier works are especially important for UVA’s research and teaching.
Finally, a new curator will join the Kluge-Ruhe later this month for a six-month curatorial residency. Katina Davidson (Kullilli/Yuggera) is Curator of Indigenous Art at QAGoMA in Brisbane. She has just completed judging the finalists at the Telstra NATSIA Awards in Darwin.
In Brisbane, she curated mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson, a career survey of work by the acclaimed Waanyi artist which has just closed. Other major exhibitions co-curated by Davidson include Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art in 2022-2023 and Mavis Ngallametta: Show Me the Way to Go Home in 2020.
During her residency, Davidson will curate an exhibition that focuses on paintings by artists working with the Spinifex Arts Project in the Great Victoria Desert’s Tjuntjuntjara community, produced between 2010-2021. Coincidentally, one of them – Noli Rictor – just won the ‘Big Telstra’ prize in Darwin. The exhibition will be drawn from a significant collection of more than 50 paintings given to Kluge-Ruhe by Gary Brown and Greg Castillo of the University of California at Berkeley, featuring artists such as the Rictor brothers, Lawrence Pennington, Tjaruwa Woods, Patju Presley and Timo Hogan.
It will also include large collaborative paintings on loan from exhibition partner Fondation Opale. Located in Switzerland, Fondation Opale will present an expanded version of the exhibition in late 2026.
