Vernon Ah Kee: the Kuku Yalandji and Gugu Yimithirr artist from Innisfail who co-founded proppaNOW and represented Australia at the 2009 Venice Biennale
Vernon Ah Kee was born in 1967 in Innisfail in far north Queensland, a descendant of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji, Koko Berrin and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. He began his artistic training with a screen-printing course at Cairns TAFE and worked as a screen-printer before moving to Brisbane in 1996 to study at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1998, majoring in drawing and screenprinting, completed Honours in 2000, and was awarded a Doctorate of Visual Arts in 2007. He subsequently worked as an academic at QCA before becoming a full-time artist. His cousin is Tony Albert, with whom he co-founded proppaNOW.
In 2004, Ah Kee co-founded proppaNOW with Richard Bell, Jennifer Herd and others including Gordon Hookey, Laurie Nilsen, Bianca Beetson, Andrea Fisher and Tony Albert. The Brisbane-based collective was formed in direct response to the marginalisation of urban Aboriginal artists by funding bodies and the wider art industry, which tended to direct attention and resources toward artists from remote communities. Bell had declared in 2002 that Aboriginal art was controlled by white people, a position Ah Kee shared. proppaNOW sought to reassert the presence and validity of urban Indigenous artists in Australian cultural life.
Ah Kee's practice spans large-scale drawing, text-based works, video, photography and installation. His large pencil and charcoal portraits of his family and ancestors are among his best-known works, rendered at a scale that demands attention and refuses easy dismissal. His text works use the Universal font and manipulate colonial language to generate secondary meanings: his 2003 work austracism plays on ostracism; becauseitisbitter (2009) appropriates imagery of racial hostility. The series CantChant (2007–09) responded to the Cronulla riots through surfboards carrying Aboriginal imagery. His 2011 work tall man at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, addressed the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee in custody on Palm Island in 2004. He drew Portrait of My Father in 2017 following his father's death in a car accident in 2014, describing it as a labour of love.
He represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 as part of Once Removed, and was the subject of the ABC Arts documentary Not A Willing Participant (2010) which followed that exhibition. He also participated in the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Figuring Landscapes at Tate Modern London in 2008, and both the 1st and 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennials at the National Gallery of Australia. The first major publication on his work, borninthisskin, was published in 2009. In 2011 he co-founded Iscariot Media with Leesa Watego, advising Indigenous arts practitioners on developing their practice.
His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, the Museum of Old and New Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Hood Museum of Art in the United States.
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