In 1983 a Warlpiri man living at Papunya asked to join the Papunya Tula Artists studio. Within a year he had won the inaugural National Aboriginal Art Award and been commissioned to design the Parliament House forecourt mosaic. His painting hangs in the Sydney Opera House, his mosaic paves the forecourt of Parliament House, and his design appears on the Australian five-dollar note.
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Wenten Rubuntja Pengarte AM was born around 1923 at Burt Creek north of Alice Springs, an Arrernte lawman and senior custodian of the Yeperenye Dreaming who learned to paint in secret after watching Albert Namatjira at work in the 1950s. He led more than 1,000 people through Alice Springs demanding the Land Rights Act in 1976, co-presented the Barunga Statement to Bob Hawke in 1988, and helped win Arrernte native title over municipal Alice Springs land in 2000.
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Tommy McRae was born around 1835, a man of the Kwatkwat people of the Upper Murray who refused to go to a mission reserve, lived at Lake Moodemere near Wahgunyah and drew in pen and ink lying on the ground, building each figure from the feet up without ever making a correction. He drew corroborees, hunting scenes and ceremonies, placed Indigenous people at the centre of his compositions and European settlers at the edges, and in 1897 sued a photographer in the Corowa court for failing to pay him.
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Born in 1967 in Innisfail in far north Queensland, Vernon Ah Kee is a Kuku Yalandji and Gugu Yimithirr artist who co-founded the Brisbane collective proppaNOW in 2004 and represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. His practice spans large-scale portraiture, text-based works, video and installation addressing race, identity and colonial history in Australia.
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The first Cairns Indigenous Art Fair opened on 21 August 2009 inside three repurposed World War II oil storage tanks in the botanical precinct of Gimuy/Cairns.
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Minnie Pwerle was born between 1910 and 1922 in the Utopia region of the Northern Territory, a custodian of the Awelye Atnwengerrp women's ceremony whose artistic life before canvas was applying body paint to ceremony participants. She began painting on canvas at approximately 80, encouraged by her daughter Barbara Weir, and within two years her work was in the AGNSW, NGV and Queensland Art Gallery, her asking prices among the highest in the NATSIAA exhibition.
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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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