The epic narratives of the Dreaming, the genesis of land and humanity, comprise the most powerful means of organizing, understanding, and reconstituting the significance of place and people in Australian Aboriginal societies. This exhibition features eleven contemporary Aboriginal paintings depicting stories from the Dreaming. In these abstract works, desert artists evoke the connection between land and visual narrative in order to convey and preserve cultural heritage, identity, and knowledge despite two hundred years of oppressive settler governance and alienation from their homelands.
Accompanying the exhibition, the films Night Cries (1990), Heaven (1997), Nice Colored Girls (1987), and Up in the Sky: Tracey Moffatt in New York (1999), by filmmakers Tracey Moffatt and Jane Cole, will be shown in the Sanders Seminar Room, next to Loew Auditorium, during regular museum hours.
This exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art and curated by Barbara Thompson. It is made possible by the William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Hall Fund.
