Emily Kame Kngwarreye - Infinite Women

Born: 1910, Australia
Died: 3 September 1996
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Emily Kam Ngwarray

This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Childhood and Early Life
Kngwarreye was born and raised in Alhalkere, a community adjoining Utopia (which was reportedly named by pastoralists in the 1920s when they discovered that the land was home to an over-abundance of easy-to-catch rabbits), an area some 230 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, Australia’s third-largest settlement (a sparsely populated area of land managed and populated by members of a particular community). Alhalkere consists of five communities – Alhalpere, Rreltye, Thelye, Atarrkete and Ingutanka – created autonomously by Aboriginal Australians, who had successfully claimed their land in the early phase of the land rights movement (before being designated as a reserve by the Australian government). Alhalkere, the name place with which Kngwarreye’s name is inextricably linked, is not, then, a single location but refers rather to the “Country” name given to the grouping of the five communities (all linked by the Anmatyerre language).

Kngwarreye was the adopted daughter of Jacob Jones, a respected man of law who worked in Alyawarre, an area of land attached to the Utopia settlement. She had an older brother and sister, and the family was part of the Anmatyerre language group who were also engaged in local traditions such as Awelye painting. Kngwarreye didn’t see a white person until she was nine years old. Kngwarreye said of her childhood, “We used to eat bits and pieces of food, carefully digging out the grubs from Acacia bushes. We killed all sorts of lizards, such as geckos and blue-tongues, and ate them in our cubby houses […] My mother used to dig up bush potatoes and gather grubs from different sorts of Acacia bushes to eat. That’s what we used to live on. My mother would keep on digging and digging the bush potatoes, while us young ones made each other cry over the food — just over a little bit of food. Then we’d all go back to camp to cook the food, the atnwelarr yams […] We didn’t have any tents — we lived in shelters made of grass. When it was raining the grass was roughly thrown together for shelter. That was in the olden time, a long time ago”.

Those who knew Kngwarreye on a personal level described her as periodically “bossy” and “fiery” individual who spent most of her life working as a stockhand on nearby cattle ranches, and as a camel handler (or “cameleer”), in an era when most aboriginal woman worked as domestic helpers. She married twice, and when she was with her second husband, she lived with him at Wood Green cattle station, an area of land that stretched across two Aboriginal groups: the Anmatyerre and Alyawarre. Although she never had children of her own, she played an important maternal role in helping to raise her brother’s children, Gloria Pitjana Mills, Dolly Pitjana Mills, and Barbara Weir (Weir, like her aunt, went on to become a renowned Alyawarre artist).

There is little further biographical detail on Kngwarreye’s life predating her meteoric rise to national and international fame in the last decade of her life. However, The National Museum of Australia (NMA) offered the following summation: “[Alhalkere] was the source of her paintings – her genius loci [in classical Roman art, genius loci was the name used to describe a protective spirit of a place and was often symbolized through religious iconography]. Even physically, Emily’s pierced nose bore homage to the ancestor Alhalkere, a pierced rock standing on the Country of the same name. The enactment of these strong cultural connections to her community and Country through kinship ties, ancestral history and law was an everyday practice that informed her art, making her life and art inseparable”.

Education and Early Training
Kngwarreye career as an internationally-recognized artist started towards the end of her long life. In the late 1970s, she participated, with twenty other women, in government-sponsored workshops in Alyawarre (then called Utopia Station). The group was introduced to traditional art forms including tie-dye, block painting, and batik, a method (originating in Indonesia) of producing colored designs on textiles by dyeing them, having first applied wax to the parts to be left undyed.

In 1977, Kngwarreye led the Woman’s Batik Group, which functioned as a communal project, with no single artist receiving recognition for their work. The batik artists produced colored patterned designs on textiles by dyeing them, having first dripped melted wax onto the areas of the fabric they wanted to remain untouched by the dye. The Woman’s Batik Group developed a distinctive style characterized by what curator Judith Terry identifies as, “free gesture”, a “wandering line”, and a preference for “the accidental”. The batiks produced by the group were first exhibited in 1980 at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs. The following year those same works were chosen by Adelaide’s Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute to be shown at Adelaide Arts Festival.

Don Holt, a third-generation pastoralist, and who had known Kngwarreye since she was a child, had attended the Araluen exhibition. He and his wife, Janet, the art coordinator at Papunya, a small indigenous community adjacent to Utopia, purchased the first of hundreds of silk batiks by Kngwarreye. (As future champions of Kngwarreye and the Aboriginal Art Movement, The Holts established the Delmore Gallery in 1989, in Delmore Downs Station, a former cattle station on the border with Utopia.) Several other private collectors and public galleries acquired her batiks, earning her the title: “Queen of the Woman’s Batik Group”. In 1981 (at the age of 71), Kngwarreye travelled to Adelaide for the first time, with the batik exhibition Floating Forests of Silk.

In 1988, the Woman’s Batik Group was commissioned to produce 88 batiks for the opening exhibition of the Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute in Adelaide, which was titled Utopia – A Picture Story. The exhibition also toured internationally, giving many of the participating artists the opportunity to venture beyond their state borders for the first time in their lives. It was also in 1988 that Kngwarreye began working with acrylic painting, a medium introduced to the local community by Rodney Gooch, a member of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). As Kngwarreye explained, “I did batik at first, and then after doing that I learned more and more and then I changed over to painting for good. […] I got a bit lazy […] I finally got sick of it […] I didn’t want to continue with the hard work batik required – boiling the fabric over and over, lighting fires, and using up all the soap powder, over and over. […] My eyesight deteriorated as I got older, and because of that I gave up batik on silk – it was better for me to just paint”.

Within the year, CAAMA organized an exhibition of 81 paintings by the Utopia artists, titled Summer Project 1988/89, at the S. H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney. Every single work was purchased by South African-born Australian entrepreneur, and Australia’s first billionaire, Robert Holmes à Court, who had also made a number of purchases at the earlier Araluen show. Later in 1989, artist Christopher Hodges opened the Utopia Art Gallery in Sydney where he showcased the works of the Utopia artists. By now, their works were gaining national recognition, and CAAMA donated over one million dollars to the group. Kngwarreye also held her first solo exhibition at Utopia Art Sydney in April 1990, where Holmes à Court again purchased every work. Sadly, however, he died suddenly (of heart failure) at the age of just 53, marking the loss of one of the most important early supporters of Indigenous Australian artists. Nevertheless, as gallerist and art dealer Adrian Newstead notes, “Holmes à Court [had by then] ensured that [Kngwarreye] and the Utopia movement gained immediate and enduring recognition”.

Mature Period
In 1971, Kngwarreye was introduced to the predominant Aboriginal style of painting, “dot painting”, at the Papunya Tula Art Centre by arts educator Geoffrey Bardon. This style, pioneered by Aboriginal painter Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, was characterized by dots of equal size placed next to one another in particular patterns to produce shimmering effects. However, Kngwarreye developed her own style by varying the size and color of her dots, and then often overlapping them. By 1991, Kngwarreye was receiving commissions from the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings in Melbourne, and the DACOU Aboriginal Gallery in Adelaide (among others). Many of her works sold for very high prices at auction.

As Newstead explains, “As it turned out, she was to prove far too prolific and elusive for any one dealer, and any attempt to monopolize her output proved futile. Nevertheless, the Holts purchased around 1,500 of her paintings over the following seven years and amassed a formidable personal collection. They cultivated relationships with selected galleries in Sydney and Melbourne, later expanding to include Chapman Gallery in Canberra. Due to their strategic placement of Emily’s works outside Alice Springs, her paintings did not appear in any quantity in the town until the early 1990s. This kept Emily out of the tourist galleries and shops at a vital early stage of her career, thereby establishing an aura of collectability and exclusivity around her name”.

Late Period and Death
Newstead notes that Kngwarreye’s “reputation soared as dealer after dealer beat their way to her camp, and such was Emily’s energy and output that no-one will ever know just how many other people she painted for”. Indeed, she completed at least one painting per day, culminating in the production of over 3000 paintings in just eight years. Kngwarreye prospered financially to the extent that she was able to purchase luxuries, such as cars, for her extended family. Indeed, she was, for a time, ranked the highest-earning woman in the country. Newstead writes, “[her art] gave rise to a number of seismic shifts in the Australian art world [including] the ascendance of women’s art in the Eastern and Central deserts; the opportunity for galleries to source high-quality art from outside the art centre system; and the emergence of entrepreneurial and prolific artists capable of gaining unprecedented earnings”.

Kngwarreye’s works were featured posthumously with works by other Indigenous Australian woman artists in the Venice Biennales of 1997 and 2015.
In her final years, Kngwarreye became an honored Anmatyerre elder custodian of the women’s Dreaming sites in her homeland of Alhalkere. She learned little English, always preferring to speak in her native Anmatyerre tongue. In addition to being a ceremonial leader, Kngwarreye was an active leader in the land rights movement, playing a central role in the 1979 return of Alhalkere (formally Utopia Station) to her people. In 1992, she was awarded an Australian Artist’s Creative Fellowship by the Australia Council, making her the first Indigenous Australian artist to receive the country’s highest cultural honor.

Kngwarreye passed away in Alice Springs in 1996. In 1997, her works, as well as those of Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson, were selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. In 1998, a Major retrospective followed, Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere – Paintings from Utopia, at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, and her first international solo exhibition (organized by the Aboriginal Gallery of Dreamings) at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam took place in 1999. When her work was included in a 2000 exhibition of Indigenous Australian artists at the Nicholas Hall of the Hermitage Museum in Russia, one local critic wrote that “This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cased in the mentality, technology, and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage”. In 2013, the Emily Museum, dedicated to her work, was opened in Cheltenham, Victoria. It was the first museum in the country devoted to the work of a single Aboriginal artist.

The Legacy of Emily Kame Kngwarreye
An Australian Qantas aircraft named, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and painted in a special livery based on her work Yam Dreaming.
Kngwarreye was a trailblazer whose achievements were important for their influence on subsequent Indigenous painters, including Barbara Weir, Ada Bird Petyarre, Polly Ngal, Lilly Sandover Kngwarreye, and Gloria Petyarre. Her art also played a part in bringing Australian Indigenous art into the view of an international audience (including Minimalist Sol LeWitt, who owned at least one of her works and was said to have been directly influenced by her). Curator Deborah Edwards writes “[with her] magnificent canvases […] she appears to have aimed for essentialist visions of the multiplicities and connectedness of her country [and] to expand beyond, her clan codes, in abstractions of ceremonial markings and imagery of her country’s flora and fauna”.

Kngwarreye’s art has also rekindled debates (dating back to early modernism) within the contemporary artworld by those who were sensitive to the accusation that Western art markets appropriated indigenous art, and in so doing, stripped away its very essence. Neale, for instance, wrote, “… how can we produce […] great contemporary Australian art that is not marginalised through cultural difference? We need to create an environment where [Kngwarreye’s] paintings function simultaneously as cultural narratives without becoming objects of anthropological scrutiny, and as works of modernist abstract art without being sanitised of their cultural content”. Kngwarreye’s cross-over was a seen as a more progressive development by indigenous art curator Margo Neale who wrote, “No artist has painted their country the way she has, inflecting it with her personal vision and innovative style. Her ability to penetrate the soul of this land and capture the hearts, minds and imagination of the Australian audience is beyond art. […] Hers is not a view of the land, but rather its voice. She re-scaled the landscape with a cosmic dimension akin to a landscape of the Aboriginal mind, and this perspective is being written into the global imagination”.

The following biography is republished from The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Written by Dorothy Erickson, Independent Scholar. See below for full attribution.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye was a leading Indigenous Australian artist. An Aboriginal woman from central Australia, she was born in 1910 on Utopia Station where she worked as a stockman and became a senior figure. “Tradition demanded reciprocal rights and obligations in all matters concerning the group or clan” ( Caruana,1999).” Nonetheless, within the communal whole, each individual had an inherited place, one that was enhanced through ritual and personal attainments”(Caruana, 1999). “[She] emerged as one of Australia’s leading painters of modern times [yet] started painting in the public arena only when she was in her eighties” (Caruana, 1999). Her work became recognised nationally and internationally and is included in major public and private collections in Australia and overseas. The work is distinctive for its expressive abstract style. “Kngwarreye’s prominence [was] no overnight sensation; it [founds] its roots in a lifetime of ritual and artistic activity” (Caruana, 1999), on decades of making art for private purposes, of drawing in the soft earth, of painting on “people’s bodies in ritual” (Caruana, 1999) situations.
“Kngwarreye was a founding member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group which commenced operations in 1977. This communal project operated on an egalitarian basis [and] no one artist was singled out” (Caruana, 1999). “It is the early batik work [that] holds the clues to her development as a painter. The technique of batik is unforgiving; each mark, each stroke of the canting is recorded, layer upon layer” (Caruana, 1999). “The work reveals an exuberance of gesture and a sureness of hand. Here are found the elements [that recurred] in Kngwarreye’s later paintings” (Caruana, 1999). “[She uses] the lexicon of marks as a springboard, constantly varying, reinterpreting and creating anew” (Caruana, 1999). “Her energetic paintings were a response to the land of her birth, Alhalkere, north of Alice Springs: the contours of the landscape, the cycles of seasons, the parched land, the flow of flooding waters and sweeping rains, the patterns of seeds and the shape of plants, and the spiritual forces which imbue the country. Kngwarreye’s vision of the land was unique; her paintings challenge the way we look at art by Aboriginal Australians” (Caruana, 1999).
“[Kngwarreye]began to attract attention partly due to the prominence gained in 1989 by the reproduction of her first canvas, Emu woman 1988-89 on the cover of The Summer Project catalogue for the exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney” (Caruana, 1999). “The work was selected as a mark of respect to the artist’s seniority” (Caruana, 1999). “Suddenly, public interest in Kngwarreye’s paintings created a great demand. Within a short space of time her earnings were substantial but would be, according to custom, distributed amongst kin. From this grew a level of expectation and the pressure to produce work, from family members and dealers alike” (Caruana, 1999). She had forty-eight group exhibitions in a three-year period. In 1989 she was awarded a Holmes à Court Scholarship and “in 1992 she received an Australian Artist’s Creative Fellowship. Kngwarreye regarded the award as recognition of her past efforts and the means to retire; it was time to pass on the mantle of senior artist to others” (Caruana, 1999). Up until her death in 1996, however, she continued her work.