How to Start an Aboriginal Art Gallery
Our winning dream searcher writes that she fell in love with Aboriginal art on a visit to Australia and Southeast Asia several years ago. She loved the dream and mystical nature of the work. She’d like to learn more about both the art and how she might open a gallery in her hometown, New York City.
The uniqueness and cultural significance of Aboriginal art has captivated visitors to Australia and art lovers for years. It has a complicated historical, political and aesthetic background. But appreciating it and becoming involved commercially are vastly different.
photo: http://flickr.com/photos/paulmannix/303565495/
Some of the issues our dream searcher, along with others who share her fascination, would have to deal with are acquiring enough knowledge and savvy about emerging art trends; guaranteeing authenticity, especially as it relates to Australian traditional art works; and buying and selling an elusive and emotional product, art.
Australia
Twenty years ago, John W. Kluge, billionaire media mogul, started building what might be the largest collection of Aboriginal art outside Australia. In 1997 he donated it to the University of Virginia now known as the Kluge Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. It included pieces from every major Aboriginal art-making community.
At the University of Virginia, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute offers a course that would help expand your knowledge of Aboriginal Art and Culture. It is available this Spring.
"...This course will examine the art of Central Australia, one of Australia’s most beautiful areas and an important center of indigenous art production. We will look at traditional art forms and those brought about through contact with outsiders, such as Hermannsburg watercolors and Ernabella pastels. A major focus of the class will be the emergence of contemporary acrylic painting at Papunya in 1971 and the dissemination of art production throughout the desert. We will concentrate on four art-producing communities: Papunya, Yuendumu, Utopia and Balgo, each with a distinct local style, and examine historical events which have shaped contemporary Aboriginal art.
Suggested Reading: Morphy, Howard. Aborginal Art A & I (Art and Ideas). London: Phaidon Press, 1998..."
The cultural references are integral to the art. But all is not appreciation and originality in this world. Authenticity, and therefore value, is a frequent issue in the buying and selling of Aboriginal art.
An interview with a long time gallery owner in Manly, New South Wales, Australia asked this:
Q:" You touched on the matter of authenticity of work. I understand this is a bit of a problem in Australia. How does one know that an artwork is made in Australia and made by an Indigenous Artist?
A: That’s an interesting question, and is a big issue for us to compete with. As I said, all our work includes information on the artist and is signed for as being genuine Indigenous Australian Art. However, many of the stores you see around stocking ‘Aboriginal Artwork’ actually import it from Indonesia. Some places even stock ‘Aboriginal Rain-sticks’ or ‘Aboriginal Masks’, neither of which were a part of Aboriginal culture."
This is an issue the Australian government is attempting to address by creating a code of conduct "... designed to strengthen fair and ethical trade in the Indigenous visual art industry. It specifies a set of minimum standards for dealers, agents and artists, and defines terms of trade, rights and responsibilities for the sale and management of artworks. The implementation of a code of conduct was a key recommendation of the Senate Inquiry report into the Indigenous visual arts and craft sector, which revealed unscrupulous and illegal commercial practices towards Indigenous artists. The Australia Council for the Arts and Department for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts have developed the draft code of conduct with industry input..."
To better understand the issues you can consult the Background to draft Australian Indigenous art code of conduct.
Other organizations are working closely to support the standards.
The Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association stresses the need for ethical galleries and dealers. And the National Association for the Visual Arts LTD is an organization representing and advancing the professional interests of the Australian visual arts and craft sector. NAVA undertakes advocacy and lobbying, research, policy and project development, data collection and analysis. It also provides expert advice, resources, professional representation and development and a range of other services.
Australia established more than 50 government-supported arts and crafts centers across the continent starting in the mid 1980s for artist training and nurturing. Some Aborigines began to attend the centers when the government was seen to be changing policies towards them. It has turned Aboriginal arts into a $100-million-a-year industry.
In 2003 in Sydney, Australia, in a New York Times article it was noted that..." Less than 20 years ago "you could barely give it away," said Tim Klingender, director of Sotheby's Aboriginal art department in Sydney. "People just didn't take art made by Aboriginal painters seriously."
"But at our sales in July," he said, "we'll have people from all over the world bidding hundreds of thousands of dollars for art you could have bought for hundreds in the 1970's. We're estimating a total sale value of more than $3 million."
However, the art market is currently taking it on the chin, along with the rest of the economy. An art sale in Sydney was a disappointment last Fall. And recently the New York Times echoed that in an article entitled The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!
photo: http://flickr.com/photos/ciamabue/1334583002/
Though New York is awash in all types of art galleries, those featuring Aborigine art are limited. Nevertheless, over the years, several galleries have devoted shows to it.
In the states the now 20-year-old vogue for Aborigine paintings seems to have cooled, but beginning in 1989 it was reported that:
"...A new episode in the story of aboriginal art occurs on Saturday, with the opening of an exhibition of paintings at the John Weber Gallery in Manhattan's SoHo district. John Weber... has priced the aborigines' works up to $23,600. Aboriginal art already has a tenuous foothold outside Australia - in the collections of Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, the Queen of Denmark, Wim Wenders, John Kluge, Yoko Ono, the Vatican and others. In Paris, the Pompidou Center's ambitious exhibition of contemporary world art, "Magicians of the World", which opened last Wednesday, features a large installation of aboriginal paintings, and the center plans an extensive aboriginal exhibition for 1991. And in Hollywood last November, a star-studded party launched Caz Gallery, which is devoted entirely to aboriginal art...
An Australian Aboriginal Art show was presented last Spring in New York, at Art Now, by the California based Molloy Gallery of Australian Aboriginal Art
Other exhibitions have been at the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University. (2007)
- Robert Steele Gallery (2006)
- 511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
The Australian Aboriginal Fine Art Gallery, run by Australian Suzun Bennett, has moved several times since its beginnings in 2001, but it can be found in the gallery-dense area of Chelsea.
- The Australian Aboriginal Fine Art Gallery
- 64 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10010
In 2002 this gallery acquired U.S. distribution rights for Aboriginal Art Print Networks catalog of more than 300 limited-edition prints. The acquisition launched the gallery's new Online Affiliate Program. "The Online Affiliates Program is of great interest to art galleries, wholesale and retail print distributors, corporate art specialists, art enthusiasts and corporate customers," said Gallery Director Suzun Bennett. "Partners simply add this exclusive collection of prints to their Web site, and the fulfillment of each order will be carried out by Australian Aboriginal Fine Art Gallery, preserving the partner's branding."
While waiting for the art market to recover you can expand your knowledge and move towards your dream by building expertise.
Along with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute class there is art business training available at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and Christie’s Education programs are geared for either a Master’s degree or part of a continuing education program.
To learn more about the art of various Aboriginal artists and styles these books are well worth a look.
- Papunya - A Place Made after the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement
- by Geoffrey Bardon: one of the original advocates of Aboriginal art, and James Bardon.
- Aboriginal Art, Identity And Appropriation (Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific) - Illustrated
- Sep 30, 2005
- by Elizabeth Burns Coleman.
In a review of this book in Australian Aboriginal Studies, Christiane Keller writes "... It is a great pleasure to review this book because it provides original answers to many questions and problems that arise when we talk about appropriation, authenticity and copyrights with regard to Aboriginal art...."
A in-depth look at the world of Aboriginal Art may be found in an article in Art In America (April 2007) - The dream of aboriginal art: the author reflects on the visual richness and symbolic complexity of an art form that has come to occupy a significant place in the history of modernism, author Richard Kalina says “... American interest in Aboriginal art is lively if sporadic. A newly dedicated gallery at the Seattle Art Museum largely devoted to Australian Aboriginal art opens May 5th(2007.) Probably the most important exhibition in the United States of Aboriginal art, "Dreamings, the Art of Aboriginal Australia," was organized by the Asia Society in 1988. It traveled widely, to considerable acclaim. Other exhibitions in commercial galleries followed in the next few years, notably at the John Weber Gallery in New York in 1989. Weber became, for a number of years, an enthusiastic supporter of Aboriginal art. "Icons of the Desert: Early Paintings from Papunya," organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, is scheduled to open in January 2009. It will travel to the Fowler Museum at UCLA in April 2009, and to New York University's Grey Art Gallery in September of that year. Dreaming Their Way: Australian Aboriginal Women Painters" was on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. [June 30-Sept. 24, 2006], and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. [Oct. 7-Dec. 10, 2006]..."
Trying to find a job in the international art world is made a little easier through agencies specializing in offering both training and placement. Sophie Macpherson Ltd is an example of only one.
Joan is also interested in the art of Southeast Asia; both classical and modern interpretations.
Unfortunately much Asian Art is also experiencing a cooling off period. And the usually popular International Asian Art Fair, scheduled in New York for 2009, has been cancelled.
I’ll have to leave the arts from places as diverse as Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to another Dreamsearcher answer.
Good luck