Australian Aboriginal Art — To whoever is not listening to the sea

Australian Aboriginal art is the longest uninterrupted art tradition in the world, dating back 20,000+ years. Who knew that the only museum in the US to be dedicated solely to this art is in Charlottesville, Virginia! The Kluge-Rhue Aboriginal Art collections is a small museum that houses the collections of two men, who acquired aboriginal art from Australia from the 1960s- 1980s.

The museum is free, open daily (except Monday). Tours are offered on Saturdays at 10:30am. We missed the tour and are sorry we did. It's a small place and a guide probably would have helped us get more out of it.

Like Native people in the United States, indigenous people in Australia are diverse. The museum does a nice job helping you to understand a bit about the cultures of the artists. The work on display when we visited largely focused on art that depicted a sense of connection with land and country.

From the Art and Country exhibit:

Brandy Tjungarrayai (1930-2012); Pintupi

Wati Kutjara (To Initiated Men) 1998

"This painting tells the story of two ancestral men (the two circles) who tried to lift the earth to heaven. To do this, they took six magic stones (the semicircles) from inside their stomachs, and placed three on each side of the waterhole (the central rectangle). After heir plan failed, they wept and traveled to another waterhole, where they still reside today. The artist has used contrasting colors to create the illusion that the magic stones are lifting the waterhole up from the rest of the painting." (Exhibit literature, Kluge-Rohe Museum.)

Untitled. 1989

"Many paintings from Central Australia are symbolic maps of the artist's country. Concentric circles represent important named places in teh landscape, while the lines between them show paths of ancestral beings. This painting refers to a series of stories called the Tingari Cycle, and this particular story is about bush grass. The seeds of the plant are gathered and ground into a paste, which is then cooked on coals to create damper (bush bread." (Exhibit literature, Kluge-Rohe Museum.)