SYDNEY, Sept 21 (NNN-AAP) – The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Australia’s oldest art museum, will take the largest-ever international exhibition of Indigenous art to North America, next year.
The NGV announced yesterday that, over 200 works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, will be displayed in the U.S. and Canada for three years.
Titled “The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art,” the show will debut at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, in Oct next year, before moving to the Denver Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum and back to the NGV in Melbourne.
The gallery will feature works by more than 130 Indigenous artists from across Australia.
NGV director, Tony Ellwood, said, the exhibition was an opportunity to educate a broader audience about the complexity of Indigenous Australian culture.
“There’s never been a work of this scale shown of Australian First Nations artists anywhere in the world,” he told News Corp Australia newspapers.
“I’m hoping that, there are many ways in which artists will, from this exposure, be able to benefit in many future projects.”
The exhibition has been developed by Myles Russell-Cook, the NGV’s senior curator of Australian and First Nations art, in collaboration with Indigenous elders and the NGV’s First Nations Art and Design Strategic Council.
“We see this show as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for people to discover and fall in love with Indigenous art from Australia,” Russell-Cook told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Among the works included in the exhibit is Mun-dirra, a 100-metre-long woven fish fence, commissioned by the NGV and took a group of 13 artists over two years to make.– NNN-AAP
