Rockhole and sandhills at Watukurri

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Rockhole and sandhills at Watukurri

Artist Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri (Australian, Pintupi language group, c.1926-1998)

Date1995

Dimensions71 5/8 × 47 13/16 × 1 1/8 in. (182 × 121.5 × 2.8 cm)

MediumPolymer synthetic paint on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott

Object number

2016.11

On View

Toledo Museum of Art (2445 Monroe Street), Gallery, 04

DescriptionThe painting is abstract with black and white striped lines that circulate around the painting with a reddish rectangle in the center. The overall composition has an Op Art, meditative effect.

Label TextFollowing the Australian government’s assimilationist policies for Aboriginal peoples, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri and many Pintupi people were relocated by 1960 to a settlement called Papunya. By 1971, Geoffrey Gardon, a schoolteacher, along with several art advisors, helped the men at Papunya to produce paintings and share them with broader audiences (women later participated as well). Namarari was a founding artist at the Papunya Tula artists cooperative and one of the most significant artists in this region. Papuyna artists experimented with color, style, brushwork, and form. They used complex dot and line patterns to express Dreamings (stories passed down generationally about the creation of the world by Ancestral beings) connected to land, history, and culture. These patterns also served to obscure what was considered secret-sacred knowledge, since only those who “owned” a Dreaming were allowed to know the full story. In this work, Namarari visualizes a sacred site of his home country, Watukurri, with concentric lines representing sandhills that surround a sliver of a rockhole, a natural watering place.