Aboriginal art exhibit opens at Hood Museum in Hanover
Guests of the Hood Museum of Art can now experience "Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala."
The exhibition is open through Dec. 4 before moving to other cities in the United States.
On Saturday, there are a few public events at the museum from 1 to 4 p.m. for people to learn more about the Yolŋu aboriginal artists and get hands-on with the technique used for the paintings.
“A lot of the art in this exhibition is about relationships, and about how new people relate to one another, but also how they relate to place and to non-human beings,” said Jami Powell, the curator of Indigenous art at the Hood Museum.
The process of creating these works of art can be painstaking.
“The artists have to go through years and years of ceremonial training to even be allowed to paint them, and then they have to go out and they have to find a suitable tree,” said Henry Skerritt, curator of the Indigenous Arts of Australia at the University of Virginia. “And they have to gently trim the bark from the tree, and, and soak it and flatten it and let it rest for sometimes two or three months. That's before they even start painting, then they have to collect the natural materials.”
The eucalyptus bark and the paint are all natural.
“They have a saying that if you're going to paint the land, you've got to use the land,” Skerritt said. “So, there's no heading down to the art shop to get your paint and brushes. Everything in this exhibition comes from the earth.”
The ability to showcase art almost 10,000 miles from the land where it was made is special for artist Ishmael Marika.
“I'm proud of it and proud of the Yolŋu artists,” Marika said.
Also part of the display are films that were created by Marika. He comes from an artistic family; his grandmother and father both have paintings in the exhibit. He wanted to share in their tradition.
“I want to bring these stories from the bark paintings into reality,” Marika said.
The curators of the exhibit want people to think about what each piece means.
“I hope people will appreciate not only the aesthetic qualities of the works, but the intellectual generosity that's embedded within them,” Powell said.
He continued by saying he hopes visitors understand the deeper meaning behind the art.
“Really what I want people to get out of this is to recognize that this is a culture that has lived in harmony with the land for 50,000 years and produced one of the most important contemporary art movements of our time,” Skerritt said.