Art from Milingimbi: Taking memories back

There are particular moments in the history of art when exceptional things happen. Such a moment occurred in the 1950s in Milingimbi, the small island community in Arnhem Land in far northern Australia.Gathered in groups in the deep shade of the tamarind trees, artists worked alongside one another, their individual approaches and shared visual language resulting in a distinctive style of painting of a quality and scale never before seen. These artists ? including Binyinyuwuy, Buranday, Dayngangan, Dawidi, Djäwa, Djimbarrdjimbarrwuy, Lipundja and Makani ? created exquisite bark paintings with jewel like surfaces that capture the complexities of land, sea, sky and cultural inheritance in the one seemingly abstracted image.Art from Milingimbi, developed in close collaboration with the Milingimbi community, celebrates these artists and their art. It presents for the first time sixty-two

Cara Pinchbeck is a member of the Kamilaroi community. She has been curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales since 2007. Lindy Allen is senior curator, Anthropology (Northern Australia) in the Humanities Department at Museum Victoria. She is currently the partner investigator on the Australian Research Council Linkage Project with the Australian National University. Louise Hamby is a research fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, at the Australian National University. She is chief investigator on the Australian Research Council Linkage project.