Arts This Week: Spinifex Artist Exhibition at Kluge-Ruhe with Katina Davidson
By Sage Tanguay
Date: 03/27/2025
Sage Tanguay 00:05
The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection’s latest exhibition is called “In the Beginning: Paintings by Senior Artists of the Spinifex Arts Project.” For Arts This Week, we spoke to the curator, Katina Davidson.
Katina Davidson 00:20
My name’s Katina Davidson. I’m a curator from Australia. I have spent six months working with Kluge-Ruhe as a curatorial fellow, which means that I’m tasked with curating an exhibition from their collection. I’ve been really privileged to be here, living here for six months on the land of the Monacan nation, and I’m just really humbled by the experience of being here. So thank you.
Katina Davidson 00:46
Back home in Australia, I work for a museum called the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, and I’m the curator of Australian Indigenous art there. This opportunity was advertised nationally in Australia via Creative Australia, which is our federal arts funding body. The reason why I wanted to apply for it is to really understand perspectives of Indigenous Australian Art internationally. And Kluge-Ruhe is the only museum dedicated to Australian Indigenous art outside of Australia. So it’s a really exciting opportunity to be able to come here and have a look at works in the collection, and then really talk to the networks around art and culture here in the States.
Katina Davidson 01:36
Curating, for me, it’s like storytelling, where we’re storytellers, but we don’t share stories as much, really, through written language, but we share stories by pulling together groups of artworks and creating a narrative around that. The exhibition is called “In The Beginning: Senior Artists of the Spinifex Arts Project.” There’ll be a public opening of the exhibition on the 27th of March. The exhibition is comprised of 18 paintings from the western desert in Australia, which is a really large geographical area. Over the last year or two, there’s been a really big donation of over 35 paintings from that region to Kluge-Ruhe. I’ve been researching about each of the artists and the artworks in order to create this, this exhibition, which will be on display for about a year.
Katina Davidson 02:34
As part of that process, I’ve worked really closely with doing some consultation with Spinifex Arts Project, which is an art center, which all of the artists work in and work for. They’ve got a great studio there. And they also do a lot of artists camps, so people can kind of pack up everything, put it in a on a troopy, which is like an SUV, kind of with 4-wheel drive capacity. So people kind of put, you know, all their painting materials in. You might pack a swag, you know, pillow and some blankets, and go out into the bush and do like a camp and create artwork before coming back to the studio. And, you know, maybe finishing off the painting in the studio.
Katina Davidson 03:23
A lot of the artwork from this community, they’re really colorful, quite abstract paintings which have a lot of texture on the surface. So whether they’re dot work, which people might associate with Indigenous Australian art. But there’s also, you know, these really beautiful fields of color, which I describe as kind of, if you’re if you’re driving along a road, you can see the a beautiful horizon line, and you can see rain clouds in the distance, and you can see these fields of rain just kind of falling from the sky. One of the artists, Mr. Patju Presley, he really is able to take these kind of inspirational cues from the natural environment and kind of create these built up dotted landscapes which kind of look like those bits of rainfall from the distance.
Katina Davidson 04:25
All of the paintings are really connected to place and country. And place and country are really important to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian people, because that is, that is the land that we come from. People might be familiar, or semi familiar, with the term dreamings, and in this community, it’s called Tjukurpa. So Tjukurpa is that term which is all encompassing, which covers creation stories about how people came to the desert in Australia, and also how the landscape was physically formed, but it also determines social interactions and law and marriages. So it’s this really kind of all-encompassing idea of how you conduct yourself as a person living in the world. And so all of the paintings in the show are informed by this Tjukurpa, and also about different sites and locations within within the landscape belonging to the Spinifex people. Spinifex is like a shrub that is in the desert and found in the sand dunes across you know this really large expanse of country in Australia, which is also the name of the art center Spinifex Arts Project, and how people kind of relate to themselves in that area. The
Sage Tanguay 05:53
The opening reception for the exhibition will take place from 5 to 7pm at the Kluge-Ruhe on March 27th. More information and gallery hours can be found at kluge-ruhe.org.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu
