Dorothy Napangardi

Dorothy Napangardi (born circa 1952 or 1956 is a distinguished contemporary Indigenous Australian artist from Mina Mina. She is one of around 3,000 Warlpiri speakers who live in or are originally from the Tanami Desert region of Central Australia.

Dorothy Napangardi grew up in the settlement town of Yuendumu, where her father is still a senior lawgiver. She had little formal schooling, but was instructed in the historic Dreaming of her people. 'Dreaming' is an imprecise English translation of the Warlpiri word 'Jukurrpa', which describes the origins and journeys of ancestral beings in the land, and identifies the sacred places where the spirits reside.

The Jukurrpa theme, generally, is one of the inseparability of the self from the environment and usually includes travelling across the land. These are notions than can also be found in Napangardi's art, with its profusion of intersecting lines suggesting spiritual meaning and evocative depth. In the words of a Warlpiri speaker quoted in a catalogue of Napangardi’s work: “To me, Dorothy’s work is like Yapa (people) running through and across their country, moving across their pathways when they go travelling.”

A highly informative catalogue, 'Dancing Up Country. The Art of Dorothy Napangardi', was published in 2002 in conjunction with a major exhibition of her paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In it, Aboriginal art expert Christine Nicholls writes that “Dorothy Napangardi’s success as an artist lies in her ability to evoke a strong sense of movement on her canvases, an effect she achieves because of her remarkable spatial sense and compositional ability. Her work can be appreciated on multiple levels”, though indigenous commentators tend to see painting as “a stage for human activity, rather than seeing the geometric aspects of the work.”

In 2001 Napangardi won first prize in the 18th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award for her work Salt on Mina Mina, after winning lesser prizes in the same festival in 1991 and 1999. Dorothy Napangardi was represented and nurtured by Gallery Gondwana in Alice Springs until 2010.

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