Boomalli Prints and Paper : Making Space As an Art Collective

Founded in Sydney in 1987, the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative helped to invent the category of urban Aboriginal art while cultivating artists whose work cut across multiple generations, sexual orientations, and language groups. Focusing on pivotal moments in the careers of Boomalli’s founding members, these essays insist that the choice of media matters. As they worked with photography, printmaking, textiles, and watercolors, the artists of Boomalli challenged stereotypes of Aboriginal identity and revealed new ways of creating community and tradition. This companion volume to a major exhibition at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection provides a truly intersectional approach to the study of contemporary Aboriginal art and is an important contribution to the study of Indigenous art and its significance to contemporary art history.

Ash Duhrkoop is a PhD student at the University of Virginia specializing in global modernism and African art. She has held a number of curatorial positions, including most recently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, where she coauthored The Arts of Africa: Studying and Conserving the Collection. Douglas Fordham is Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. He has published widely on British art and empire, most recently in Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, 1770–1820.