Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia

25 January–12 March 1989

For more than 30,000 years, Australia’s Aboriginal societies have used their colorful and complex art to express the individual experiences and spiritual values of a culture rich in mythology and ritual. “The Dreaming” refers to highly symbolic Aboriginal rituals and beliefs involving ancestral beings. The “Dreaming” itself is symbolic of the continuity of life, serves as the spiritual and organizational foundation of Aboriginal society. Contrary to our Western concept of dreaming, the Dreamtime was a time, an epoch when supernatural beings lived, multiplied, and frolicked in the region of the earth. These beings took the forms of the various mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, and fish that populate the Australian continent from whom the Aborigines are descended. Since 1971, Aboriginal artists have made these designs public, symbolically depicting the “dreamings” of their worlds by painting them in acrylic on canvas and other modern materials.

The exhibition of these Dreamings was organized by the Asia Society in New York and the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, and includes paintings and sculptures from a variety of Aboriginal societies across the thinly populated heart of Australia. Among the objects displayed were examples of the first Aboriginal paintings to be collected by outsiders dating from the mid-19th century to the present. Most of the works are from the South Australian Museum, which has the largest collection of Aboriginal art in the world. In coordination with the exhibition, the Smart Museum sponsored two lectures, one by Ramona Austin, Assistant Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, and by Howard Morphy, Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University.

The exhibition was funded in part by the International Corporation of Australia and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Chicago showing was supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support was received from the Gordon Marks Gallery, San Francisco, and Ansett Airlines of Australia.

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