It’s the video that has tipped Australia’s art world into crisis.
In the remote APY Lands of South Australia, 1400km from Adelaide in the tiny desert settlement of Amata, acclaimed Indigenous artist Yaritji Young is daubing onto a giant canvas when Tjala Arts centre manager Rosie Palmer, a white woman, appears in frame and begins painting on the same artwork.
“Can I juice this one up a little bit?” Palmer asks, before painting red circles on Young’s canvas, which is meant to represent the artist’s “Tjukurpa”, or sacred stories.
“Could it do with another rockhole there, or is that going to be too circular?” a second young white studio staffer says to Palmer.
Click here to watch the full video
The video, filmed two weeks ago, was obtained by The Australian during a four-month investigation into alleged white interference in highly-prized black art from the APY Arts Centre Collective (APYACC) which vehemently denies the claims.
Art from the APY Lands is in big demand, with collectors regularly paying tens of thousands of dollars — sometimes hundreds of thousands — for paintings.
It’s not the only confronting thing to emerge and now the fallout has begun.
Anangu artist Paul Andy is among several who have made extraordinary and serious allegations that white staff have deliberately interfered with Indigenous paintings in the collective’s Adelaide studio. Senior Indigenous artists have called the act of white staff painting on desert art “immoral” and want the board of the APYACC to resign.
Now the National Gallery of Australia has been drawn in, announcing this week it will launch an urgent independent investigation into whether white studio assistants painted on Indigenous artworks that are destined for its showcase winter exhibition in June.
The gallery announced on Monday it would examine the provenance of works in the Ngura Pulka: Epic Country exhibition of APY Lands art, which is scheduled to open in less than nine weeks and has been heavily promoted as “entirely” created by the APY Art Centre Collective’s Anangu painters.
The NGA has even used Yaritji Young in its promotion of the exhibition, quoting her attesting to the provenance of the works.
Indigenous artist Fiona Foley, a former member of the Australia Council, said the scandal coming out of the APYACC had the potential to discredit and destabilise the Aboriginal arts sector.
“The multiple layers of nepotism, actual and perceived conflicts of interest and allegations of falsifying authorship have not been satisfactorily responded to by the NGA director Nick Mitzevich, or the NGA council or assistant director Indigenous engagement, Bruce Johnson McLean,” Dr Foley said.
The paintings of APY artists hang in all our major public galleries and in the great institutions of the world, such as the British Museum in London, the Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
After being shown a still image from the clip, Palmer said: “I absolutely deny that I am painting in this photo. I am holding an unused brush and a bucket of pre-prepared red wash that Yaritji has already used to lay down the tjukula (rockhole) and passed back to me.”
Click here to read The Australian’s full investigation
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