Makinti Napanangka

Makinti Napanangka passed away in January 2011. The term Kumentje is used instead of her personal name as it is customary amongst many Indigneous communities not to refer to the deceased by their original given name for some time after their death

Kumentje Napanangka was a Pintupi-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Australia's Western Desert region. She lived in the communities of Haasts Bluff, Papunya, and later at Kintore, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north-east of the Lake MacDonald region where she was born, on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Kumentje Napanangka began painting Contemporary Indigenous Australian art at Kintore in the mid-1990s, encouraged by a community art project. Interest in her work developed quickly, and she is now represented in most significant Australian public art galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia. A finalist in the 2003 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, Kumentje won the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2008. Her work was shown in the major Indigenous art exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Working in synthetic polymer on linen or canvas, Kumentje's paintings primarily take as their subjects a rockhole site, Lupul, and an Indigenous story (or "dreaming") about two sisters, known as Kungka Kutjarra. She was a member of the Papunya Tula Artists Cooperative, but her work has been described as more spontaneous than that of her fellow Papunya Tula artists.

Kumentje Napanangka's year of birth is uncertain, but a plurality of searches indicate she was born around 1930, although other sources indicate she may have been born as early as 1922 or as late as 1932 at a location described by some sources as Lupul rockhole but by one major reference work as Mangarri.All sources agree that she comes from the area of Karrkurritinytja[notes 2] or Lake MacDonald,which straddles the border between Western Australia and the Northern Territory, 50 kilometres south-west of Kintore, and about 500 kilometres west of Alice Springs.

Kumentje's first contact with white people was seeing them riding camels, when she was living at Lupul.She was one of a large group of people who walked into Haasts Bluff in the early 1940s, together with her husband Nyukuti Tjupurrula (brother of artist Nosepeg Tjupurrula and their son Ginger Tjakamarra, born around 1940. At Haasts Bluff they had a second child, Narrabri Narrapayi, in 1949. The population moved to Papunya in the late 1950s, where Kumentje had another child, Jacqueline Daaru, in 1958. She had a daughter, Winnie Bernadette, in 1961 in Alice Springs.The family moved to Kintore when it was established in the early 1980s, and by 1996 Kumentje was painting there for the Papunya Tula Artists Cooperative. Her children Ginger, Narrabri passed away in 2010 and Jacqueline also became artists, all of them painting for Papunya Tula Artists.

Physically tiny yet robust and strong, Kumentje was described as "a charmer and an irascible character", with an infectious smile.

Central Art has removed Kumentje's image in respect to her family.

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