Papunya Tula, registered as Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, is an

artist cooperative An artist cooperative (also co-operative or co-op) is an autonomous visual arts organization, enterprise, or association jointly owned and democratically controlled by its members. Artist cooperatives are legal entities organized as non-capital sto ...

formed in 1972 in

Papunya Papunya ( Pintupi-Luritja: ''Warumpi'') is a small Indigenous Australian community roughly northwest of Alice Springs (Mparntwe) in the Northern Territory, Australia. It is known as an important centre for Contemporary Indigenous Australian art ...

Northern Territory The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory shares its borders with Western Aust ...

, owned and operated by

Aboriginal people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

from the Western Desert of Australia. The group is known for its innovative work with the Western Desert Art Movement, popularly referred to as "dot painting". Credited with bringing contemporary Aboriginal art to world attention, its artists inspired many other Australian Aboriginal artists and styles. The company operates today out of Alice Springs and its artists are drawn from a large area, extending into

Western Australia Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...

, west of Alice Springs.

Background

In the late 1960s, the

Australian Government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government ...

moved several different groups living in the Western Desert region to

, north-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, to remove them from cattle lands and assimilate them into

western culture Leonardo da Vinci's ''Vitruvian Man''. Based on the correlations of ideal Body proportions">human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise ''De architectura''. image:Plato Pio-Cle ...

. These displaced groups were primarily

Pintupi The Pintupi are an Australian Aboriginal group who are part of the Western Desert cultural group and whose traditional land is in the area west of Lake Macdonald and Lake Mackay in Western Australia. These people moved (or were moved) into ...

, Luritja, Walpiri, Arrernte, and

Anmatyerre The Anmatyerr, also spelt Anmatyerre, Anmatjera, Anmatjirra, Amatjere and other variations) are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Northern Territory, who speak one of the Upper Arrernte languages. Language Anmatyerr is divided into Easte ...

peoples. In 1971, Geoffrey Bardon, the school teacher at the community, encouraged the children to paint a mural using the traditional style of body and sand ceremonial art. This painting style was used for spiritual purposes, and so had strict

protocols Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...

for its use. Many symbols depicted personal

totems A totem (from oj, ᑑᑌᒼ, italics=no or ''doodem'') is a spirit being, sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe, such as in the Anishinaabe clan system. While ''the wo ...

and Dreamings, and others more general Dreamtime

creation stories A creation myth (or cosmogonic myth) is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it., "Creation myths are symbolic stories describing how the universe and its inhabitants came to be. Creation myths develop ...

. When some of the elder men saw what the children were doing, they felt the subject matter was more suited to adults. They began creating a mural depicting the

Honey Ant Honeypot ants, also called honey ants, are ants which have specialised workers (repletes, plerergates, or rotunds) that are gorged with food to the point that their abdomens swell enormously. Other ants then extract nourishment from them, through ...

Dreaming. Traditionally, Papunya is the epicentre of the Honey Ant Dreaming, where

songlines A songline, also called dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land (or sometimes the sky) within the animist belief systems of the Aboriginal cultures of Australia which mark the route followed by localised "creator-beings" in the Dr ...

converge. The European-Australian administrators of Papunya later painted over the murals, which the curator Judith Ryan called "an act of cultural vandalism", noting that " e school was de-Aboriginalized and the art no longer allowed to stand tall and defiant as the symbol of a resilient and indomitable people". While visible, the mural proved highly influential, leading other men to create smaller paintings of their '' Jukurrpa'' (Ancestral stories), on any available surface, including bits of old

masonite Masonite is a type of hardboard, a kind of engineered wood, which is made of steam-cooked and pressure-molded wood fibers in a process patented by William H. Mason. It is also called Quartrboard, Isorel, hernit, karlit, torex, treetex, and ...

, car bonnets, tin cans, and matchboxes. This explosion of artistic activity is generally regarded as the origin of

contemporary Indigenous Australian art Contemporary Indigenous Australian art (also known as contemporary Aboriginal Australian art) is the modern art work produced by Indigenous Australians, that is, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander people. It is generally regarded a ...

. The collective, originally entirely Aboriginal Australian men, formed in 1972. They derived the name ''tula'' from a small hill near Papunya, a Honey Ant Dreaming site. A few women, notably

Pansy Napangardi Pansy Napangardi (born 1948) is an Australian artist. She is associated with the Jukurrpa group of women artists in Alice Springs where she lives today. Early life She was born at Haasts Bluff, Northern Territory, Australia. She remains one of ...

, began to paint for the company in the late 1980s. It was not until 1994 that women generally began to participate. While the collective artists used a style of painting traditional in the sand and for body adornment in ceremonies, most of them had never painted before in Western style – that is, using

acrylic paint Acrylic paint is a fast-drying paint made of pigment suspended in acrylic polymer emulsion and plasticizers, silicone oils, defoamers, stabilizers, or metal soaps. Most acrylic paints are water-based, but become water-resistant when dry. De ...

and a hard surface. As their work gained in popularity, the artists omitted or changed many of the spiritual symbols for public viewing, as the Aboriginal community criticised the artists for revealing "too much of their sacred heritage".Judith Ryan in Bardon 1991: ix-x According to Ryan: For

Hetti Perkins Hetti Kemerre Perkins (born 1965) is an art curator and writer. She is the eldest daughter of Australian Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins and German Eileen Munchenberg, a granddaughter of Hetty Perkins, sister to film director Rachel Perkins ...

and Hannah Fink, the artists through their paintings "trace the genealogies of their ancestral inheritance". And comment that "Through the paintings of the Papunya Tula Artists we experience the anguish of exile and the liberation of exodus. ... In refiguring the Australian landscape, the artists express what has always been known to them. And in revealing this vision to an outside audience, Papunya Tula artists have reclaimed the interior of the Australian continent as Aboriginal land. If exile is the dream of home, the physical longing for homelands expressed in the early paintings has now been answered". In the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the establishment of the ''

Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 The ''Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976'' (ALRA) is Australian federal government legislation that provides the basis upon which Aboriginal Australian people in the Northern Territory can claim rights to land based on tradit ...

'', many of the people left Papunya for their traditional lands, but the art cooperative persisted and continued to grow. For many years the market and museums virtually ignored their work. A major exception was the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), that has the largest collection of just over 220 early works acquired between 1972 and 1976, thanks to the visionary efforts of the MAGNT Director Dr Colin Jack Hinton and Alice Springs gallery owner Pat Hogan. This was still as of 2008 the nation's largest collection of early boards. The

National Gallery of Victoria The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and most visited art museum. The NGV houses an encyclopedic art collection across two ...

did not acquire any works produced by the collective until 1987, when Judith Ryan convinced the current director to purchase 10 of the works.Staff. (5 January 2008
"Bold vision of artistic rebirth"
''

The Age ''The Age'' is a daily newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, that has been published since 1854. Owned and published by Nine Entertainment, ''The Age'' primarily serves Victoria, but copies also sell in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory ...

''. Retrieved 2008-08-11. At the time, the asking price was , which Ryan described in 2008 as "a steal", given the escalation in value. In 2007, a single painting by Papunya Tula artist

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri AO (1932 – 21 June 2002) was an Australian painter, considered to be one of the most collected and renowned Australian Aboriginal artists. His paintings are held in galleries and collections in Australia and ...

set a record at

auction An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition ex ...

for price commanded for Aboriginal art, bringing £1.03 million (or $2.4 million), more than twice as much as the previous record-holder.

Today

The company now operates out of Alice Springs, and covers an enormous area, extending into

, west of Alice Springs.

Exhibitions

Art Gallery of NSW 2000 Exhibition

In 2000, the Art Gallery of NSW held an exhibition, curated by

, for the

Sydney Olympic Games The 2000 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the XXVII Olympiad and also known as Sydney 2000 (Dharug: ''Gadigal 2000''), the Millennium Olympic Games or the Games of the New Millennium, was an international multi-sport event held from 1 ...

Arts Festival. The exhibition, entitled ''Papunya Tula, Genesis and Genius'', was the first major retrospective exhibition of the cooperative.Allan, Susan (24 August 2001
"Papunya Tula--the birthplace of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art"

World Socialist Web Site The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is the website of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It describes itself as an "online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement". The WSWS publishes articles and analys ...

. Retrieved 2008-08-11.

National Museum of Australia 2007–2008 Exhibition

For a period of several months (27 November 2007 to 3 February 2008), the

National Museum of Australia The National Museum of Australia, in the national capital Canberra, preserves and interprets Australia's social history, exploring the key issues, people and events that have shaped the nation. It was formally established by the ''National Muse ...

exhibited a collection of Papunya paintings from the first few years of the movement. Most of the works displayed in the collection had not been seen before by the general public as most of these paintings were bought by the

Aboriginal Arts Board The Australia Council for the Arts, commonly known as the Australia Council, is the country's official arts council, serving as an arts funding and advisory body for the Government of Australia. The council was announced in 1967 as the Austra ...

(now defunct) of the 1970s-1980s. The exhibition contains some of the most priceless and earliest works by the first generation, senior Papunya painters. These paintings were previously displayed in government offices and embassies. Curated by Professor

Vivien Johnson Vivien Joan Johnson (born 1949) is an Australian sociologist, writer on Indigenous Australian art, and former editor-in-chief of the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online. Johnson is notable for the publication of several key reference works ...

, the exhibition was significant in introducing the movement's importance to the general audience.

Musée du Quai Branly

Two Papunya artists, Tommy Watson and Ningura Napurrula, are also represented in Paris at the ''Musée du Quai Branly'', dedicated to indigenous art of the world. Napurrula's signature black-and-white motifs appear superimposed on the ceiling of the administration part of the museum's building.

Papunya Tula artists

First generation men (the Bardon years 1971–73)

* Anatjari Tjakamarra *

Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri __NOTOC__ Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, (c. 1927, in Ilpitirri near Mount Denison,- September 2015) was one of Australia's best-known artists of the Western Desert Art Movement, Papunya Tula. Tjapaltjarri's mother was killed in the Coniston M ...

*Charlie Tarawa (Tjaruru) Tjungurrayi *Charlie Tjakamarra *Charlie Egalie Tjapaltjarri *

*David Corby Tjapaltjarri *Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa *Freddy West Tjakamarra *Johnny Scobie Tjapanangka *Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula *

Kaapa Tjampitjinpa Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa ( 1920 – 1989) was a contemporary Indigenous Australian artist of Anmatyerre, Warlpiri and Arrernte heritage. One of the earliest and most significant artists at Papunya in Australia's Northern Territory in the e ...

* Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra *

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri (b.c.1926 at Marnpi southeast of Kintore, Northern Territory – 1998), was one of the most important painters to emerge from the Western Desert cultural bloc, Western Desert. From the Pintupi language group, Mick Nam ...

*Old Mick Tjakamarra *Old Tutama Tjapangati *Old Walter Tjampitjinpa (Lynch) * Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka * Shorty Lungkata Tjungurayyi * Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri * Timmy Payungka Tjapangati *

Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula (sometimes just Turkey Tolson; – 10 August 2001) was a Pintupi language, Pintupi-speaking Indigenous Australian, Indigenous artist from Australia's Western Desert cultural bloc, Western Desert region. Born near Haas ...

* Uta Uta Tjangala * Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurayyi

Second generation men

*Adam Gibbs Tjapaltjarri *Andrew Tolson Tjakamarra *Bobby West Tjupurrula *Charlie Tjapangati *Charlie Wallabi Tjungurrayi *Donald Matthews Tjapanangka *George Tjampu Tjapaltjarri *George Tjungurayi *George Ward Tjungurayi *James Gibson Tjapaltjarri *Jeremiah West Tjakamarra *John Corby Tjapaltjarri *Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula *Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri *Kanya Tjapangati *Kenny Williams Tjampitjinpa * Kumantje Jagamara, aka Michael Nelson Tjakamarra (1946–2020), joined 1983 *Lindsay Corby Tjapaltjarri *Long Jack Phillippus Tjakamarra *Matthew West Tjupurrula *Morris Gibson Tjapaltjarri * Patrick Tjungurrayi *Ray James Tjangala *Raymond Maxwell Tjampitjinpa *Raymond Tjapaltjarri *Richard Yukenbarri Tjakamarra *Ronnie Tjampitjinpa *Tony Tjakamarra *Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri

Women

*Bombatu Napangati *

Doreen Reid Nakamarra Doreen Reid Nakamarra (1955 – 20 October 2009) was an Australian Aboriginal artist and painter. Reid was considered an important artist within the Western Desert cultural bloc. She was a leading painter at the Papunya Tula artist cooperative ...

Eileen Napaltjarri Eileen Napaltjarri (born 1956) is a Pintupi-speaking Aboriginal Australian artist from Australia's Western Desert region. Eileen Napaltjarri, also known as Anyima Napaltjarri, began painting for Papunya Tula artists' cooperative in 1996. She was ...

*Kawayi Nampitjinpa *Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra *Josephine Napurrula *Kim Napurrula *Lorna Brown Napanangka *Maisie Gibson Napurrula * Makinti Napanangka *Mary Brown Napangati *Miriam Napanangka *Monica Napaltjarri * Naata Nungurrayi *Nancy Nungurrayi *Narrabri Nakamarra * Ningura Napurrula *

Norah Nelson Napaljarri Norah Nelson Napaljarri (born 26 October 1956) is a Warlpiri-speaking Aboriginal artist from Australia's Western Desert region. Norah Nelson began painting in 1986 and has exhibited her works both in Australia and other countries. Her paintin ...

*Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa *

*Pantjiya Nungurrayi *Patricia Napanangka *Payu Napaltjarri *Tatali Napurrula *

Tjunkiya Napaltjarri Tjunkiya Napaltjarri (also known as Tjunkiya Kamayi, Tjungkiya, Tunkaii Napaltari, Kowai or Kamayi) (c. 1927–2009) was a Pintupi-speaking Indigenous artist from Australia's Western Desert region. She is the sister of artist Wintjiya Napaltja ...

*Walangkura Napanangka * Yalti Napangati * Yukultji Napangati *Yuyuya Nampitjinpa

Notes

References

*''Dreamings of the Desert: Aboriginal dot paintings of the Western Desert'', Art Gallery of South Australia, 1996, * Geoffrey Bardon, ''Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert'',1979, Adelaide: Rigby * Geoffrey Bardon, ''Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert,'' 1991, Sydney: McPhee Gribble/Penguin * Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, ''Papunya: A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement'', 2006, Miegunyah Press, University of Melbourne *
Vivien Johnson (ed), ''Papunya Painting: Out of the desert'' 2007, Canberra: National Museum of Australia

External links

Papunya Tula GalleryPapunya Tula Exhibition
Art Gallery of NSW, 2000.
Papunya Painting, National Museum of Australia Exhibition, 28 November 2007 – 3 February 2008Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya
touring exhibition, United States, 2009.
Tjukurrtjanu - Origins of Western Desert Art
{{Central and Western Desert artists Australian art movements Australian Aboriginal art Australian artist groups and collectives Artist cooperatives Cooperatives in Australia