A stockman and woodcarver from Napperby Station who joined the Papunya painting group in 1972, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri became the most collected Aboriginal artist of his generation. His 1976 masterwork Warlugulong, sold to the Commonwealth Bank for $1,200, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia at auction in 2007 for $2.4 million. He died on the day he was to receive the Order of Australia.
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Richard Bell was born in 1953 in Charleville, Queensland, a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang peoples. Self-taught and politically formed by Aboriginal rights activism in 1970s Redfern, he won the 2003 Telstra NATSIAA for Bell's Theorem, co-founded the proppaNOW collective, and has staged his ongoing installation Embassy (modelled on the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy) at venues from the Moscow Biennale to Tate Modern.
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In 1989, Tracey Moffatt held her first solo exhibition and completed a film selected for Cannes. By 2017 she was representing Australia at Venice as the first Aboriginal artist to present a solo exhibition there. Born in Brisbane in 1960, fostered into a white family at three, she studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art and co-founded the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative before becoming one of Australia's most exhibited contemporary artists.
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The Yorta Yorta-Scottish mechanic from Melbourne who taught himself to paint in 1974 from a set of watercolours found in his father's shop, Lin Onus went on to hold 18 solo exhibitions, win the Order of Australia, and help place urban Aboriginal art on the national cultural map. His celebrated Fruit Bats (1991), fibreglass bats painted with Arnhem Land rarrk hanging from a Hills Hoist, remains one of the most quietly subversive works in Australian art history.
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Born around 1924 at Mirdidingki on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori lived a traditional Kaiadilt life until missionaries forcibly removed her entire community to Mornington Island in 1948. She did not pick up a brush until 2005, at around age 81, with no prior two-dimensional art tradition to draw on. In eight years she made more than 2,000 works, represented Australia at the Venice Biennale, and earned a retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.
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Tony Albert was born in 1981 in Townsville, Queensland, a descendant of the Girramay, Yidinji and Kuku Yalanji peoples. He grew up collecting kitsch objects depicting Aboriginal people from secondhand shops, coined the term "Aboriginalia" for this material, and built it into the foundation of his art practice. In 2012 he became the first Aboriginal Australian appointed as an official war artist. His permanent public memorial Yininmadyemi stands in Hyde Park, Sydney.
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Understanding the Frontier Wars is central to understanding Australian history, yet for generations this history was minimised or excluded from mainstream education. One of the most valuable resources available to educators, students, and the wider public is the podcast Frontier War Stories.
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Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford was born around 1922 at Bedford Downs Station in the East Kimberley, a Gija lawman who spent decades as a stockman before his paintings were discovered on a rubbish tip in the late 1990s. He began painting on canvas in his mid-70s and in eight years became one of the most significant artists in Australian art, with work commissioned for the Musée du quai Branly in Paris and a major retrospective at the MCA Sydney in 2006.
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Located near Derby in the Kimberley region, the Mowanjum Arts Centre represents three major language groups: Worrorra, Ngarinyin, and Wunambal.
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Each August in Darwin, on Larrakia Country, more than 75 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art centres set up booths inside the Darwin Convention Centre and sell directly to the public.
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