Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Indigenous Australians constitute the longest surviving civilization in human history, one that dates back more than 60,000 years. Among Australia’s most revered artists, Emily Kam Kngwarray (1910–1996), or Emily, as she became widely known, grew up in the remote central desert region of Utopia, where she had only sporadic contact with the world beyond her own community. While working as a stockhand, she developed her artistic skills in Utopia settlement workshops—first in traditional batik production and then painting on canvas.

While affinities may be perceived and parallels drawn between the art of the so-called Desert painters and other modern artistic idioms, their practices have developed in relative isolation and stem from the oldest continuous art traditions in the world. For Indigenous Australians, “Dreaming” is a cultural worldview that provides an ordered sense of reality, a framework for understanding and interpreting the world and the place of humans within it. This precious knowledge of human life includes survival strategies, ancestral histories, and narratives of the earth and cosmos. “Country” describes the environments that they inhabit, both physically and spiritually, and contains complex ideas about language, governance, family, and identity, among other life-determining practices.

Emily’s oeuvre was inspired by her role as an Anmatyerre elder and her custodianship of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere. In this cultural context, women’s lore is guarded and passed down through both storytelling and visual media, including designs painted on human bodies, traced in the earth, or carved into rock or tree bark.

Inspired by the topographies of desert and sky, the cycles of seasons, flooding waters and rains, cultivation and harvest, and spiritual forces, Emily’s paintings depict the enduring narratives and symbols of her people and their land, and the keeping of precious shared knowledge and stories. Her middle name, Kam, denotes the sustaining pencil yam and its seeds—Emily’s totem, and the motivating force of her oeuvre.

Emily is unique among Indigenous Australian painters for her rapid and systematic exploration of different styles and for her bold inventiveness with regard to form and color. She painted prolifically on both intimate and grand scales, with brushes, sticks, and fingertips on unstretched linen laid flat on the ground, sitting beside or within the composition itself.

Emily has been the subject of several museum surveys in Australia and Japan, and her work featured prominently in the 56th Biennale di Venezia in 2015.