‘My dream pre-dated the money.’ Nici Cumpston, artist, curator and Artistic Director of the Tarnanthi (pronounced Tar-nan-dee) Festival, that was staged across in some twenty-three venues in Adelaide, modestly left her presence out of the festival program. She left the fronting to ebullient Art Gallery of South Australia Director, Nick Mitzevich, to State Premier Jay Weatherill, who boldly declared that Adelaide was ‘now the international gateway for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in Australia’, to Olympic Dam BHP boss Jacqui McGill who stumped up the money, and to Paul Keating who opened the whole shebang with a speech that mixed personal braggadocio with challenging assertions about Aboriginal art.
But, make no mistake, it was Cumpston’s festival. While the BHP funding of four million had come only two years beforehand, as recompense to the State for its failure to expand production and employment at the important Olympic Dam mine, Cumpston can date her Dreaming back to a 2010 visit to Perth, when she was seeking art for a completely different exhibition. Allowed the freedom of the Mossenson commercial gallery, she found a treasure trove of works by the relatively unknown Andinyin artist, Ngarra; ‘dynamic, playful drawings which just wouldn’t leave my mind’, she explained. Since then, the artist, who died in 2008, has also got under the skin of American collector Dennis Scholl, who is touring him (and eight other Aboriginal artists) in the exhibition ‘No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting’, around contemporary art museums in the United States, and Melbourne curator Quentin Sprague, who included him in ‘The world is not a foreign land’, a six-artist touring show that was selected for Tarnanthi.
But Cumpston’s presentation of