Color is Life: Women's Work Today

Color is Life: Women’s Work Today is a celebration of First Nations women artists from across Australia. The artists represented here have created bold works of art that vibrantly reflect their lived experiences and living cultural practices. Artmaking has long been a life force for women and their communities. As the Tiwi artist Jean Baptiste Apuatimi said, “Painting makes me alive.”

Many of these women witnessed immense change as the impacts of colonization rapidly encroached upon their homelands. Through their art practices, they could share their ways of being, thinking, and seeing. In the south, Aṉangu women at Pukatja (Ernabella) began weaving fabrics and rugs in the late 1940s before moving into batiks, ceramics, and painting. In the north, Yolŋu women started making their own bark paintings in the mid-1960s. In the central desert, Walpiri women were the first to paint at Yuendumu in the early 1980s before being joined by the men. Some women did not begin working with new artistic mediums until the latter part of their lives, but they quickly realized the potential it held—with extraordinary results. Until the early 1990s, however, women artists still struggled for recognition.

Then in 1997, First Nations women artists in Australia achieved their most prominent international platform to date when Emily Kam Kngwarray (Anmatyerr), Yvonne Koolmatrie (Ngarrindjeri), and Judy Watson (Waanyi) represented their country at the prestigious Venice Biennale in Italy. Since that pivotal exhibition, Australian First Nations women have continued to assert their place at the vanguard of contemporary art practice. They may have been hindered at the outset by longstanding associations of their art with “craft,” but their experimentation with both new and traditional mediums has become their greatest strength.

While maintaining the cultural practices that belong to women, such as weaving, the innovative artists in this exhibition also sought new modes of cultural expression. Between the late-1990s and today they created the masterful fiberwork, paintings, prints, film, sculpture, and textiles on view. In a field once dominated by men, they have become some of Australia’s most renowned artists.

Each artist has a colorful story to tell. Country is a kaleidoscope of colors, especially if you know where to look.