I think that this will be my final post.

I just want to reflect a little bit on the course and some things that got me really excited about Indigenous Australian art - particularly the extremely wide range, which I had no idea even existed. I'm glad that we were able to cover such a large amount of information, even if only briefly, in this course - to acknowledge that it, indeed, has been and still is being created. I've always been attracted to Indigenous arts, particularly ancient Mesoamerican art. I think it will always amaze me that Aboriginal Australian art is being made in much the same way as it was when it first began. It really is one of the only cultures on this planet that retains it's traditional roots and continues to create images that much of contemporary culture not only respects, but revels in.

Exciting!

Edit: I just realized that I never posted about my trip to the Tandanya Gallery here in town. I went a couple of weeks ago because a classmate told me about the Jason Wing exhibition that was happening, which I found to be really interesting. He is a half Aboriginal and half Cantonese Australian artist focusing on his bi-culturality and the politics that go along with being an "outsider" in white Australia. The work was really engaging. It was the first time that I've been to the Tandanya, and I was happy to find a huge variety of work there, from contemporary to traditional paintings, sculpture, and installation work. Can't wait to go back and explore some more!

This week in the tutorial, we discussed the issue of ownership in Indigenous art. I had actually bookmarked this article to read and totally forgot about it, only to have it pop up in the tutorial discussion (which is a shame - I could have had much more to say).

The article talks about where exactly the money from the sales of Aboriginal art goes - which seems to be a mystery - and how new reforms hope to regulate how income is spent within an artist community. Interesting stuff...I don't really know how I feel about all of it, though. I'd like to hear some discussion of it from an Aboriginal artist's point of view.

So I've been doing some research on artists that I'm thinking about using for my final essay. I've found a billion and a half articles in the Australian that I can use (yay!) for sources, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Today this article popped up in my search for information on Vernon Ah Kee, and I realized that I had no idea what the Palm Island Riots were about....research time!

In 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, an Indigenous Australian, died in custody in the Palm Island Police Station. His was the 147th death of an Aboriginal in custody since 1990. Anyway, for obvious reasons, the public of Palm Island was outraged - the arresting officer is believed to beat him to death. That week, a riot erupted of about 400 people in which the courthouse, police station, and police barracks were burned down.

Ah Kee's cousin was one of the activists jailed for participating in the riots. His video piece, Tall Man, is compiled of footage of the events from mobile phones and news clips to create a twelve minute film of "a powerful narrative of an Aboriginal community that has become completely disenfranchised from a post-colonial Australia."