US museum to showcase Indigenous art

The Nevada Museum of Art in the USA has announced a major exhibition to showcase Indigenous rt from the Kaplan and Levi Collection.

Eternal Signs: Indigenous Australian Art will highlight work from artists in the museum’s new E. L. Wiegand Feature Gallery, showing nearly 50 works from across 17 different communities in the Central and Western Desert regions of Australia.

“For artists from remote areas of the Australian continent, their 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,” Apsara DiQuinzio, senior curator of contemporary art, said.

“These works are not just beautiful works of art they are vital expressions of ancestral knowledge that allow us to explore larger dialogues relating to contemporary art, abstraction, global Indigenous movements, and the environment.”

Featured artists include Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Polly Napangardi, Gloria Petyarre, George Ward Tjungurrayi, Djambawa Marawlli, and Gunybi Ganambarr.

The large-scale, group exhibition showcases the majority of the significant gift to the Nevada Museum of Art from Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan’s private collection of contemporary Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, which includes sculpture, paintings, and other works from diverse geographic areas across Australia, including Arnhem Land in the north, the Central Desert sites of Utopia and Papunya, and the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the south.

“The Kaplan and Levi collection is well-known and for good reason—the Seattle Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art both exhibited paintings from this collection, which can only be described as monumental in both scale and ambition,” David B. Walker, CEO of the Nevada Museum of Art, said.

“This important gift added significantly to the breadth and depth of the Museum’s Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Art of the Greater West Collection.”