Meeting artists and making friends: the role of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology in the promotion and contextualisation of contemporary Indigenous art

Presentation Topic: Cultural institutions - roles and responsibilities to communities

ABSTRACT:

The Berndt Museum of Anthropology holds one of Australia's most extensive, and enduring, collections of contemporary Aboriginal art. Items assembled by Ronald and Catherine Berndt in the 1940s provide a vital context for current art production: once contemporary, these are now historic, yet retain their unique immediacy. The Museums active acquisition programme has seen the development of an extensive network of Western Australian (and other) artists who contribute an essential role in the documentation and exhibition of these works. Active in the Museums current teaching programme (through its course Aboriginal Art and Culture), local artists inject their own perspectives and insights through both their art and their participation, enriching the Museums documentation and the history of the artworks themselves. New technologies are providing the means of enhancing the context and meaning of Aboriginal art, and Aboriginal knowledges. The collaborative role of Museum staff and local artists promote long-term commitment to contemporary art forms, from the perspectives of both producer and repository.

BIONOTE:

Dr John E. Stanton has been Founding Director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at The University of Western Australia since 1978. He has worked extensively in the Kimberley, Western Desert and South-West regions of Western Australia, promoting contemporary Aboriginal arts through travelling exhibitions and publications. These include Innovative Aboriginal art of Western Australia (1987), Images of Aboriginal Australia (1988), Painting the country (1989), Nyungar landscapes (1992) and Aboriginal artists of the South-West (2000). He also co-authored, with the late Ronald M. and Catherine H. Berndt, Aboriginal Australian art: a visual perspective (1982/1992) and A world that was (1992). He is currently collaborating with members of a number of Western Australian and Top End communities in repatriating historical photographs from the Museums collections.