Details on “NYC: Gallery Reception – Utopia Aboriginal Exhibition”
Advance, the American Australian Association and Robert Steele Gallery invite members to a special reception to view the Australian Aboriginal art exhibition New Work From Utopia.
Named by German settlers immigrating to Australia in the 1920’s hoping for better times, Utopia has, since the mid-1970’s, played a distinct and important role in the development of modern Australian Aboriginal Art. From the Womens’ Batik Project of 1978 [begun to empower local women and provide a source of income in advance of their regaining land rights to their ancestral homes] through to the Asia Society’s Dreamings exhibition in New York in the ˜80’s, Utopia has come to be associated with some of the finest and most famous contemporary Aboriginal artists.
Among the artists included in the exhibition will be the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who helped pave the way for contemporary Australian Aboriginal art, Gloria Petyarre, Minnie Pwerle and Barbara Weir, as well as many artists who are as yet less internationally known.
Robert Hughes has called Australian Aboriginal Art the world’s last great art movement, and its richness, complexity and depth support that view. Emerging from the Earth’s most ancient and still functioning culture, this is no outsider art, and the case could be made that all other art traditions present a parallel aesthetic universe at best. Perhaps, in a sense, it is we who are all outsiders.
New Work From Utopia, in conjunction with the DACOU Gallery [the Dreaming Art Centre of Utopia] in Adelaide and with a partnered exhibition at the Embassy of Australia, Washington, DC [from 19 July to 1 September, 2007], will be the first major exposition of Australian indigenous art in New York City since 2004.
Born in London, Robert Steele spent much of his adult life in Australia, and with his Anima Gallery pioneered the exhibition of indigenous Australian Art and artists. Now, as the only gallery in New York with an extensive major collection of this work, and as one of only a few in the US dealing with it in any substantial way, the Robert Steele Gallery is especially proud to present New Work From Utopia.
