A recent exhibition at the Harvard Art Museum set out to change how we view and contextualize Australian Indigenous art—not as relics of the past, but as contemporary, internationally relevant contributions. Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, was guest curated by Stephen Gilchrist, an associate lecturer of art history at the University of Sydney. As an Indigenous Australian himself, of the Yamatji people of the Inggarda language group of Western Australia, Gilchrist shaped the exhibition with an insider’s perspective, hoping to broaden some minds in the process.
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“I think people are surprised by the diversity—that there’s more to Indigenous art than just dots and bark painting,” he shared in an interview.
“Many of the narratives that we have inherited from art and social history are at the very least incomplete. The exhibition is about time, but it is equally about power and who gets to claim it,” comments Gilchrist. “Indigenous people are not merely from the past. We are couriers and keepers of what has been, what is, and what could be.”
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The exhibition advances our understanding of these works from a technical standpoint: In preparing for the show, conservation scientists mapped the elemental composition of traditional bark paintings, comparing them to various ochre samples collected while touring Indigenous art centers in Australia—many of which have since been added to the Forbes Pigment Collection.
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