Launch of Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art
“Crosscurrents in Australia First Nations and non-Indigenous Art testifies to the need for Australian institutions to collaborate with First Nations people more often and better.” – Eds.
In 2024, The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand awarded their Best Anthology prize (sponsored by Australian Institute of Art History) to the 2024 publication, Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and non-Indigenous Art (eds Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald, Caroline Jordan).
Please join us to launch the paperback edition of the book, and the Special Issue of Australian Historical Studies entitled Australian Art and its Aboriginal Histories (eds Caroline Jordan, Helen McDonald, Sarah Scott, Fiona Paisley and Tim Rowse). Experience the 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art exhibition in the Potter Museum of Art with a special on-site presentation by artist Megan Evans.
The Potter will be open for visitation from 5pm, with presentations beginning at 6pm. The book will be available for sale at the event courtesy of The Paperback Bookshop.
Link to event at Potter Museum:
This edited collection examines art resulting from cross-cultural interactions between Australian First Nations and non-Indigenous people, from the British invasion to today. Focusing on themes of collaboration and dialogue, the book includes two conversations between First Nations and non-Indigenous authors and an historian’s self-reflexive account of mediating between traditional owners and an international art auction house to repatriate art. There are studies of ‘reverse appropriation‘ by early nineteenth-century Aboriginal carvers of tourist artefacts and the production of enigmatic toa. Cross-cultural dialogue is traced from the post-war period to ‘Aboriginalism’ in design and the First Nations fashion industry of today. Transculturation, conceptualism, and collaboration are contextualised in the 1980s, a pivotal decade for the growth of collaborative First Nations exhibitions. Within the current circumstances of political protest in photographic portraiture and against the mining of sacred Aboriginal land, Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art testifies to the need for Australian institutions to collaborate with First Nations people more often and better.
Crosscurrents-in-Australian-First-Nations-and-Non-Indigenous-Art
The book will be presented in the frame of the exhibtion “65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art”,
Potter-Pusem-65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art