Exhibiting Western Desert Aboriginal painting in Australia’s public galleries: an institutional analysis, 1981-2002

This paper documents and analyses the exhibition history of Aboriginal painting in Australia’s public art galleries over a two-decade period. It concentrates on Western Desert acrylics but is not confined to this movement or region alone. Based on a review of catalogues from key exhibitions, it identifies three interpretative frameworks used by curators to validate the presence of Aboriginal painting in the contemporary art realm. These modes of interpretation are called the aesthetic, ethnographic and the ownership discourses. Despite being a problematic art at odds with conventional art-historical classifications, Aboriginal painting was elevated to a position of prominence in Australian art history. Institutionally, Western Desert painting found legitimacy in the dominant aesthetic legacy of modernism. This modernist art historiography overrode the minority interests of cultural pluralism and critical postmodernism.