08/05/2026
Coming this fall, From the Australian Desert: Contemporary Aboriginal Painting celebrates fifty years of Papunya Tula Artists and a painting movement that emerged in Australia’s Central Desert.
Now widely recognized in global contemporary art, painting at Papunya began in 1971 when a small group of Aboriginal men in the community started to represent once-secret ancestral designs of ceremony and ritual using acrylic paint on scraps of cardboard, linoleum, and Masonite. Their seemingly abstract paintings revealed living ancestral connections known as Tjukurrpa (ancestral stories), fueling powerful artistic experiments with color, line, and space.
Featuring more than 120 paintings, the exhibition brings together some of the most iconic works of Indigenous Australian art and reveals the deep, ongoing relationships between Aboriginal artists, the places they paint, and Tjukurrpa, which exists in a constant state of past and present together—or, in Pintupi, irrititja kuwarri tjungu.
📅 October 16, 2026–March 14, 2027
Organized by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia in partnership with Papunya Tula Artists. The local presentation is made possible in part by the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art’s Museum Association and generous donors to the museum’s endowment.
🖼️ Inyuwa Nampitjinpa, “Travels of Kutungu from Papunnga to Muruntji,” 1999. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Collection of Richard Klingler and Jane Slatter © Estate of the artist. Licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd.
Kluge-Ruhe Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd UVA Arts
