Yams, tomatoes, Potatoes & Plums from October 25, 2021 to December 11, 2021 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Isabella Chilcoat
While the Yams, Tomatoes, Potatoes, & Plums exhibition in the STAMP Gallery is visually exquisite and captivating, we ought to understand why and how this “genre” arose and the deeper effects of colonization and appropriation. The long history of Australia finds frequent neglect in the American education system, limiting our public’s broader acumen of Australian culture generally, but especially of the communities native to the territory. Because of such limited familiarity, it is easy for our American brains to consume the current works on display only for their “pretty colors” while forgoing a comprehensive appreciation for the artists or the sordid history they endured all to eventually gain notoriety in the mainstream art scene. I should adjust — a mainstream art scene that has traditionally rejected or degraded not just female artists and artists of color, but has also abused indigenous artists by appropriating their culture or denying the artists the credit they are due based on a lack of “formal training” or societal ignorance. It is, therefore, critical that we, as the public encountering Indigenous Australian art, inform ourselves and learn how to interpret works outside of our conventional artistic canon.
The most helpful place to start is researching directly from the source. Our exhibit features an informative primary source video interview in the first gallery niche on our right side wall with one of the artists, Esther Bruno Nangala. She explains her work, Bush Tomato, its symbols, and, briefly, customs of harvesting and processing of bush tomatoes in her community. She details the importance of the harvest for women with their parts in planting, collecting, and then processing the tomato by grinding it into a paste and rolling the paste into balls for children to eat. Here, we can gather an easily accessible contextual basis for at least one painting in the collection.
Moving into some of the broader history of Australian history of Indigenous peoples and Western colonization of the land, the beginnings of colonial activity arose in the late 16th Century. On January 26, 1788 British Captain, Arthur Phillip, landed in Australia simultaneously marking the land’s first foreign settlement and the commencement of an enduring brutal campaign over indigenous peoples and their land for Britain’s territorial growth. The years to follow obliterated native populations through the devastation and dispossession of lands, introduction of diseases, and direct violence. Today only 3.3% of Indigenous people remain in the Australian population.
Some of the greatest problems arise in describing Indigenous artworks when art critics, collectors, curators, and large museums neglect the historical context and fail to attribute the same credit to Indigenous and self-taught artists as “classically trained” Western artists. Certain terminology repeatedly arises in the Western media that degrades the credibility of othered artists (“other “ being non-white, non-Western) — negatively connotated descriptors include words like “untrained,” “primitive,” “tribal,” “primal,” “untainted,” or “pure,” etc. Such a phenomenon arises when people hold the context of the works over the physical form. For instance, when looking at a piece by Leonardo daVinci, arguably the most famous name in Western “classical” art, most people of the general public understand him as a “master” and, accordingly, ascribe importance to his works based on his known history alone – just from seeing his name with a painting. This is not to say that da Vinci’s works are not technically impressive, but there is an automatic, or implicit, bias connected with how much the general public already understands about him.
it is pivotal that we can appreciate their context while analyzing the formal elements by their own merit.
So, when we look at the acrylic paintings on display in the Yams, Tomatoes, Potatoes & Plums exhibit, it is pivotal that we can appreciate their context while analyzing the formal elements by their own merit. Furthermore, the approach to examining the form of an Indigenous artwork or one by a self taught artist – without implicit bias – is to completely abandon anything we know contextually and to compare on the same pedestal the work to any other similar pieces that it inspires. Here, we ensure that the artist receives all the credit she deserves, fairly. That is not to contradict the first half of this essay by any means, though. We need to employ the context to understand or empathize with the work’s meaning, but not when analyzing formal elements against a different work or while forming an initial impression.
Naata Nungurrayi, Bessie Petyarre, and Esther Bruno Nangala’s work is included in Yams, Tomatoes, Potatoes, & Plums at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 25, 2021 to December 11, 2021.
For more information on Yams, Tomatoes, Potatoes & Plums and related events, visit The STAMP Gallery.