Women and painting

Photo by aia web team

Several times I've heard in the lecture that Aboriginal women only started to paint recently and it was again brought up by Nici Cumpston, our guest speaker, yesterday...and since I had a couple of hours to spare today I decided to do my own little research about it, finding out what it's really about? Were Aboriginal women not allowed to paint? What happened that caused this change?





Well, after several hours of searching some books and browsing the Internet...yes, it was a really that difficult to find information about the topic...I finally pieced the puzzle together...kind of. It was actually a surprise to me that there weren't actually many articles specially written about this topic since it was mentioned couple of times in the lecture and although I was frantically searching for an answer, I think it was more of the exploration of different issues that came up along the way which ended up being what I took most from today. 


So on to clearing the suspense of the questions, which I doubt my findings will fully clarify, I found out that Aboriginal paintings have an underlying principle about the "rights of art." The rights of arts in Aboriginal culture is based on a decent based right; it determines the exercising of rights which are often divided within age and gender (1). These rights deal with all sorts of things such as dancing, singing and painting, which are passed on and shared between the Aboriginal community. Most often in many Aboriginal communities, the ceremonial life has been sustained by males(2). While there are ceremonies based on women, they were said to either be restricted or secret ceremonies (3). These findings really remind me of how I often hear in video clips where Aboriginal artist say that they need to ask permission first to draw certain subjects or the Wandjina image, which only certain people can draw. Additionally, from an article about "Dreaming Their Way," an exhibition presenting the talents of Aboriginal women, it states that: 

Painting was initially a male occupation in a society in which the roles and responsibilities of men and women are clearly delineated. In the 1960s, however, women started painting in northern Australia, and two decades later, in the central deserts. Over the last decade women artists have received ever more attention and are often a major financial support for their families and communities. (4)

Similar to the information I found in books then, it seems that Aboriginal women had their own individual role in their community. But still, I was left with the question didn't Aboriginal women always painted on bodies for ceremonies so why didn't they paint too when Aboriginal men painted? Since I was stuck on this topic, I'll share with you another blogger from United States who posted:

There are some simple and well-known reasons for that fact. Until 1984, "Aboriginal art " largely meant acrylic painting from Papunya Tula and bark painting from Arnhem Land. The culturally conservative Pintupi men segregated their art from women entirely at first, and for over twenty years largely confined their participation to subordinate roles in completing dotted infilling. In the case of Arnhem Land work, given the medium (bark, not exactly the stuff of fine art) and the early date of first marketing (the 1930s, when commercial sales began in earnest), there was no real acceptance of the work as art rather than artifact. In both cases, mediation between artists and markets was the work of mostly male anthropologists and missionaries, which tended to obscure the role of women in producing art even further.  

Such work as women produced was treated as craftwork, in traditional media like weaving and carving. In the Western Desert, women did not begin painting on canvas for the market until 1984 in Yuendumu, 1986 in Balgo and in Alice Springs where Jukurrpa Artists was founded, and 1988 in Utopia. (5)

It baffled me to see the extensive information he found on the topic while it took me so long to find even one but nonetheless, it was really insightful to my own search of the answer. Without a doubt, many things have changed over time leading to the rise of Aboriginal women as artists and never to disappoint me, my Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture provided me with all the right answers.

Although not acknowledged, the construction of the land rights legislation in 1976 which required Aboriginal people to perform their ritual publicly and a growing interest in Aboriginal ceremonial life, these new economic and social implication would most likely have played a role in how Aboriginal women today have a more prominent role in the Aboriginal culture. Additionally, paintings has also acted as a vehicle to many opportunities for Aboriginal women who have been major victims of the destructive effects of colonization. To many Aboriginal artists, art is a source of expressing their identity and also a source of income (6). It is just like what I wrote in first essay about "We are the Young Women of this Land" exhibition in Tandanya - how photography is seen as a way to gain back the identity of Aboriginal women which have often been misunderstood as being subordinate by anthropologists (7) or taken away from them through the ongoing struggles of colonization - Art and expression have definitely played a greater and more global role for the Aboriginal community today. and so seeing more and more Aboriginal women  as artists I think would have naturally come with this.

Photo by Schub@

Phew! I definitely learned and discovered alot of new things today. What was planned to be an hour of finding information ended up being a whole afternoon of reading and searching but it was all worth it - even though the answer in the end was still a bit here and there. But I guess just like what my tutor says, its sometimes about finding the complexities  instead of finding one answer...well, atleast I know I'm doing the right thing!

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(1) Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, ed., The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture  (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 686.
(2) Ibid., 76.
(3) Ibid.
(4) "Dreaming Their Way", Hood Museum of Art, acessed  October 6, 2011, http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/exhibitions/dreaming/press.html.
(5) Will Owen, December 19, 2005 (12:51 a.m.) "Aboriginal Women Exhibition," Aboriginal Art and Culture: An American Eye, http://homepage.mac.com/will_owen/iblog/C1403073609/E20051218005329/index.html.
(6) Kleinert, Aboriginal Art and Culture, 78.
(7) Peggy Brock, ed., Women Rites and Sites (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 126.