About Art: A Map Much Needed

In September 2019, the Menil Collection, a museum located in Houston, hosted the largest exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art to visit the state of Texas. For nearly five months, visitors could contemplate—free of charge pursuant to the Menil's mission—roughly one hundred artworks on loan from the Switzerland-based Fondation Opale. The Menil's own Paul R. Davis curated the exhibition, titled "Mapa Wiya (Your Map's Not Needed)." Mapa Wiya translates as "no map" in the Pitjantjatjara language of the Central Australian desert region. That phrase is inscribed on the show's title work, a drawing by the artist Kunmanara (Mumu Mike) Williams (1952–2019), who sadly did not live to see this, the first showing of his work in a US art museum. Mapa Wiya offered visitors a wide range of contemporary Aboriginal art and hence a rich window into the Aboriginal experience.

The contemporary Aboriginal art movement traces its roots to the renaissance that emerged in the early 1970s at Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, and spread to other Aboriginal communities. Mapa Wiya presented a wide range of items, including paintings, shields, hollow log coffins (larrakitj or lorrkkon), and engraved mother-of-pearl (lonka lonka or riji). From elegant bark paintings with their hallmark cross-hatching to mesmerizing dot paintings, some of which generate optical illusions, the collection offered visitors a visual feast. Many of the pieces conveyed, at least to the initiated eye, important information about Aboriginal cosmology, known in English as "the Dreaming," or special knowledge about the particular region, or "Country," from which an artist hailed. Thus, the tiny dots, concentric circles, and repeated markings create maps of culturally significant places and events, recount ancestral narratives, or depict ancient ceremonies. Their accessible beauty harbors generations-old secrets.

Several items on display conveyed deep political meanings that could easily be missed by an American audience. Kunmanara Williams's work, for example, subversively transforms official government items, such as maps and postal bags, into powerful commentaries on the dispossession of land and culture that accompanied Australia's colonization. Meanwhile, other pieces testify to specific tragic events that occurred well into the twentieth century. In the painting Bedford Downs Massacre, Paddy (Goowoomji) Bedford depicts the killing of a group of Indigenous men that occurred not long before his birth in the Kimberley around 1922. Collectively, the exhibition offered an array of stories as diverse as that of the Australian Aboriginal experience—stories of origins and ancestors, of wrongs and losses, and of cultural resilience and challenges to authority.

Fondation Opale was established by Bérengère Primat in the Swiss village of Lens in 2018 to house her collection of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art. Taking its name from the opal, a precious stone that informs Aboriginal Dreamtime mythology, the Fondation Opale holds over eight hundred pieces by nearly 250 artists, making it one of the largest collections of Australian Aboriginal artwork in Europe. Dominique de Menil, one of the Menil Collection's founders, was a cousin of Primat's grandmother. Primat herself attended a members-only reception to launch the exhibition, at which guests enjoyed a digeridoo performance in the gallery by David Williams of the Wakka Wakka people from Queensland. Thereafter, the Menil hosted a number of public events, including a series of special panel discussions featuring Georges Petitjean, curator of Collection Bérengère Primat; Menil curator of collections Paul R. Davis; Professor Howard Morphy and Honorary Associate Professor Frances Morphy, both of the Australian National University; and Professor Fred Myers of New York University.

Mapa Wiya marked the second major Australian Aboriginal art exhibition to visit Texas. In 2018, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin was one of three US museums to host Ancestral Modern, a fifty-piece selection of works drawn from the Kaplan and Levi collection based in the Seattle Art Museum. A year earlier, the San Antonio Museum of Art held an exhibition titled Of Country and Culture to celebrate a gift to the Museum of over one hundred pieces of contemporary Aboriginal art...