Dorothy Napangardi Biography
Dorothy Napangardi (ca. 1950s – 1 June 2013) was a Warpliri and Pintupi speaking contemporary First Nations Australian artist born in the Tanami Desert (NT). When Napangardi was a young girl, her family was forced to move away from their Country to Yuendumu. After marrying, she moved with her husband and four daughters to Alice Springs, in Central Australia. This is where Napangardi eventually began painting in 1987. During the first part of her career, Napangardi painted colourful canvases of bush plum and bush banana. However, in 1997 Napangardi made a significant artistic shift both in subject matter and stylistically, creating white, delicately dotted patterns on dark-toned backgrounds. These paintings represent the Women’s Digging Stick Dreaming that she inherited from her father’s lineage. Such Dreaming Stories, or Jukurrpa, generally are themed around the concept of the inseparability of the self from the natural environment and include travelling across the Australian landscape. Napangardi’s work represents Yapa (people) running through and across her ancestral country Mina Mina. Her work is a stage for human activity and her success as an artist lies in her ability to evoke a strong sense of motion and activity on her canvases, an effect she achieved because of her remarkable spatial sense and compositional ability. The first contemporary First Nations artists, including many of the founders of the iconic Papunya Tula artists' company, had been men, and there was resistance amongst the Pintupi men of Central Australia to women painting. However, many women in these communities wished to participate and began to create art themselves in the 1990s. In this context, Dorothy Napangardi began to paint herself, becoming one of the most prolific artists of Australia and placing herself among the likes of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Minnie Pwerle and Gloria Petyarre. Collections National: National Gallery of Australia, CanberraNational Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneArt Gallery of South Australia, AdeleideAustralian National University, CanberraMuseum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory, DarwinQueensland Museum Brisbane International: Linden Museum, Stuttgart, GermanyThe Kelton Foundation, Santa Monica, USAThe Vroom Collection, The NetherlandsThe LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut, USAOwen Wagner Collection of Australian Art and the Hood Museum of Art, Charlottesville, VA, USAMetropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New YorkThe Luczo Family Collection, USA
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