Image Credit: Bessie Nakamarra Sims, Yuendumu/Warlpiri, Yarla Jukurrpa (Bush Potato Dreaming), 1996,
acrylic on canvas, 182 x 60 cm. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Gift of Will Owen and Harvey
Wagner; 2009.92.31. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISCOPY, Australia.
The Owen and Wagner Collection
of Australian Aboriginal Art
For Immediate Release
June 2010
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Announces the Owen and Wagner Collection
of Australian Aboriginal Art
The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College is pleased to announce an important
private gift of contemporary Aboriginal art. Will Owen and Harvey Wagner have gifted
over three hundred works to the museum, representing the many exciting contemporary
art-making practices of Aboriginal peoples across the Australian continent. These objects,
in styles both traditional and contemporary, are by artists from remote Outback
communities as well as major metropolitan centers, and they span six decades of creative
activity. The Owen and Wagner Collection of Australian Aboriginal Art includes acrylic
paintings on linen and canvas, earthen ochre paintings on bark, board, and canvas,
sculpture in a variety of media, weavings of palm fibers and parrot feathers, and artifacts.
The Hood Museum of Art already has distinguished art collections from Africa, the Arctic,
and Melanesia, but this gift makes the institution one of the foremost repositories of
contemporary Aboriginal Australian art outside of its home continent.
The objects come with documented provenance and, in many cases, explanatory material
that will form the basis for their scholarly interpretation. As the collectors point out, "We
wanted to represent the artistic traditions that had grown out of ceremony and myth, but
also the engaged and innovated work created by art school-educated urban Aboriginal
people from the metropolitan coasts." The Owen and Wagner Collection includes works
by Alice Nampitjinpa, Bessie Nakamarra Sims, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Clifford Possum
Tjapaltjarri, Clinton Nain, Emily Kngwarreye, George Milpurrurru, John Mandjiwuy
Gurruwiwi, Makinti Napanangka, Millie Skeen, Paddy Bedford Jawalyi, Queenie
McKenzie, Rosella Namok, Roy Wiggan, and Walangukura Napanangka.
The Owen and Wagner Collection
of Australian Aboriginal Art
The contemporary Aboriginal art movement emerged about 1970 when some senior
elders were encouraged to make paintings on boards for sale, using clan designs from
their "Dreamings" as they had done on their bodies, sand, wood, and rock for thousands of
years. Owen and Wagner became interested in Aboriginal art upon viewing the
Dreamings exhibition at the Asia Society in New York City in 1988. Although they had
long been involved with the contemporary American art scene, the works that they
encountered in Dreamings offered an exciting new perspective on what they saw as a
dynamic, abstract, and very contemporary art. Two years later they made a trip to
Australia and bought their first acrylic paintings by Indigenous Australian artists. As their
collecting continued, they remained committed to sourcing works of art directly from the
Aboriginal communities and their representatives in the capital cities, working, for
example, with Papunya Tula Artists, Maningrida Arts and Culture, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka,
Warlukurlangu, Warmun, Warlayirti, and others. The collectors observe, "As we learned
more about the history and culture of Indigenous Australians, we also learned of the great
historical injustices that had been visited upon them, and saw how those injustices were
being played out in the contemporary art market, where unscrupulous, unethical dealers
exploited the poverty that the artists lived in to enrich themselves. We therefore
endeavored to deal insofar as possible directly with the community art centers that are
owned by Aboriginal people themselves and with their representatives in major
metropolitan galleries." Owen presently publishes a weekly blog, Aboriginal Art and
Culture: An American Eye, which he began in 2005.
The collectors were lenders to the very well-received 2006 exhibition Dreaming Their
Way: Contemporary Aboriginal Women Painters and took part in related programming
while the show was on display at the Hood Museum of Art. Based on that experience and
the prospects for their collection's use at a teaching museum like the Hood, they decided
to make Dartmouth College the home of their collection. "We were greatly impressed by
the way in which the Hood Museum of Art treated the works as contemporary art rather
than as ethnographic evidence," they recall. "We were further impressed by the reaction of
the Dartmouth community, by the way the faculty brought their classes to the show, and
by the enthusiastic response to the art by the students. We felt that we had filled in the
final piece of our program: to find a permanent home where the fruits of our collecting
would be used to further the study of Aboriginal culture and to preserve the great legacy of
these modern masters." At the Hood, this collection will be used to engage faculty and
students, and the broader college community, in the process of teaching and learning with
objects, and to inform the study of art, anthropology, curation, and social history at the
college.
Dr. Brian Kennedy, Director of the Hood Museum of Art (and Director of the National
The Owen and Wagner Collection
of Australian Aboriginal Art
Gallery of Australia from 1997 to 2004), comments, "Australian Aboriginal art has been
the focus of a sequence of museum shows in the United States over recent years. The
future is very bright for this art making tradition, as a celebration of the strength of
Australian Aboriginal cultures that, aside from being startlingly beautiful, is culturally
profound and enriching." The Hood has scheduled a major exhibition and publication
about the Owen and Wagner Collection for spring/summer 2012.
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