National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award
Desert Mob
Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
2016 shaped as a year of anniversaries in Indigenous art. Not strictly linked, you might think; but wherever I went I was reminded that it was fifty years since the Wave Hill Walk Off, forty years since the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, twenty-five years since Telstra started supporting the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (the NATSIAAs), helping the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) to build an Indigenous art collection, and, in Darwin in 2016, they saw the settlement of the longest-running Aboriginal land claim at Kenbi.
One of the judges of the NATSIAAs, Brisbane artist Vernon Ah Kee, seemed not to have noticed the political nature of all this. While MAGNT Aboriginal Art Curator, Luke Scholes was writing in the Award’s catalogue, ‘The themes inherent in these landmark events: connection and belonging to land, resilience and survival, are uniquely expressed in this NATSIAA exhibition’, Ah Kee was opining, ‘Aboriginal art is so often relegated to the decorative arts or the primitive, and with good reason: because it’s been consistently described like that for decades. … I want us all to be politically aware of how we’re positioned in society. We have no choice as Aboriginal people. But a lot of Aboriginal artists, they don’t want to be seen as political, and they go out of their way to declare that. There’s lots of reasons for that—mostly it’s because they want to eat. [But their art] makes people who spend money on it feel good about themselves, without having to think about the reality of those people’s lives’ (The