Implementation of the Traveling Exhibition "Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala" and Associated Programs

FAIN: GI-271498-20

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Margo Smith (Project Director: January 2020 to present)

Implementation of a traveling exhibition about the art, culture, and environment of the Yolngu people of northern Australia.

Madayin is a traveling exhibition that will immerse visitors in the art, culture and environment of the Yolngu people of tropical northern Australia. For millenia, Yolngu have painted sacred designs on their bodies and ceremonial objects. With the arrival of missionaries and anthropologists in 1935, they turned to eucalyptus bark to express the richness and complexity of their knowledge system to outsiders. The result was an outpouring of creativity that continues to this day as artists find innovative ways to express their worldview across cultures. A unique collaboration between Yolngu curators from Yirrkala and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA, Madayin presents the history of bark painting from a Yolngu perspective. Featuring more than 100 works produced between 1935-2019, it showcases eight decades of one of Australia’s most unique contributions to global art and culture, while exposing American audiences to a complex alternative way of viewing our shared planet.

Associated Products

Madayin Exhibition Web Resource (Web Resource)
Title: Madayin Exhibition Web Resource
Author: Henry Skerritt
Author: Lauren Maupin
Author: Wukun Wanambi
Abstract: Maḏayin is the result of a six-year collaboration between Kluge-Ruhe and Indigenous knowledge holders from the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre in northern Australia. It chronicles the rise of a globally significant art movement as told from the perspective of the Yolŋu people. Maḏayin presents more than 90 iconic paintings on eucalyptus bark, inviting audiences across the US to discover this inspiring story of the sacred, the beautiful, and the power of art. "Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala" is organized by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in partnership with the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala. It opens at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth in September 2022.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://madayin.kluge-ruhe.org/
Primary URL Description: The Madayin Digital Experience offers an exploration of Yolngu art and ideas, enabling visitors to order artworks in the exhibition by clan, songline, timeline or country and to see the "madayin" or sacred patterns that connect them. Pages for individual artworks contain quotes by the artist, specific information about the meaning of symbols and imagery in the painting, the artist's biography and links to additional images and resources. Audio files provide the correct pronunciation of Yolngu words, artist's names and the titles of artworks.

Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala (Catalog)
Title: Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala
Author: Kade McDonald
Author: Henry Skerritt
Author: W. Wanambi
Abstract: This volume chronicles the rise of a globally significant art movement, as told from the perspective of the Yolngu people of northeastern Australia. It presents more than 90 iconic paintings on eucalyptus bark, many of which have never been seen outside of Australia. For millennia, Yolngu people around Yirrkala in northern Australia have painted their sacred clan designs on their bodies and ceremonial objects. These designs—called miny’tji—are not merely decorative: they are the sacred patterns of the ancestral land itself. Yolngu people describe them as madayin: a term that encompasses both the sacred and the beautiful. With the arrival of Europeans in the 20th century, Yolngu people turned to the medium of painting on eucalyptus bark with ochres. The result was an outpouring of creativity that continues to this day as artists find new and innovative ways to transform their ancient clan designs into compelling contemporary statements that is chronicled in this singular publication.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://delmonicobooks.com/book/madayin-eight-decades-of-aboriginal-australian-bark-painting-from-yirrkala/
Primary URL Description: Distributor's website
Catalog Type: Exhibition Catalog
Publisher: Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia

Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala (Article)
Title: Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala
Author: Fred Myers
Abstract: Madayin: Eight Decades of Australian Aboriginal Bark Paintings from Yirrkala has recently ended its second instantiation at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC. Madayin is a complex Yolngu term embedded in ritual practice; in the exhibit, it is glossed as sacred or beautiful, and throughout, there is much more to the 60 works presented than meets the eye. The painters and their descendants, many of whom provided essays and comments in the extraordinary bilingual catalog, insist repeatedly that they are providing the viewers with “only the surface.” As one of the Yolngu co-curators (Wukun Wanambi) records, “to tell you the truth, we can only show you the surface [garrwar] in the exhibition, rather than going deeper and deeper into that ocean of knowledge” (Wanambi et al. 2022, 22). This insistence on partial access is not simply a question of non-Yolngu viewers lacking knowledge, although that is certainly also understood to be the case. Even more than that, Wukun's comment makes clear what many of the contributors repeatedly stress: Yolngu understand knowledge itself as having extraordinary depth, its surface concealing and also intimating forms below that cannot be shared with outsiders. These concerns, including questions about the use of the madayin concept in a new context, are central for the Yolngu co-curators, who initiated the exhibition to both illustrate and protect their own epistemology, cosmology, and system of rights.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12307
Access Model: open
Format: Journal
Publisher: Visual Anthropology Review

Ancestry and Kinship in Yolngu Curation (Article)
Title: Ancestry and Kinship in Yolngu Curation
Author: Mary Gagler
Abstract: The author reviews the exhibition Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala, held at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, September 4–December 4, 2022; and the Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, DC, February 4–May 14, 2023. The exhibition’s tour continues at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, February 3–July 14, 2024; and Asia Society, New York, September 24, 2024–January 5, 2025
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7t16n5t9
Access Model: open
Format: Journal
Publisher: Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

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