Dorthy Napangardi

This beautiful piece is painted using acrylic on arches paper created by indigenous artist Dorthy Napangardi who resides in Alice Springs and Sydney. The painting is matted using a neutral white contemporary frame that go with any decor.

Dorothy Napangardi is an Australian Aboriginal artist, one of the three thousand or so Warlpiri speakers who live in or are originally from the Tanami desert region of Central Australia.

She had little formal schooling, but was instructed in the historic Dreaming of her people. “Dreaming” is an imprecise English translation of the Warlpiri word Jukurrpa, which describes the origins and journeys of ancestral beings in the land, and identifies the sacred places where the spirits presently reside. The Jukurrpa theme, generally, is one of the inseparability of the self from the environment, and the stories usually include traveling. A Warlpiri speaker is quoted in a catalog of Napangardi’s paintings: “To me, Dorothy’s work is like Yapa [people] running through and across their country, moving across their pathways when they go traveling. That’s what it reminds me of, Yapa crossing paths, crossing one another’s pathways as they go traveling.”

In 2001 Napangardi won first prize in the 18th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award Festival, Australia. She won lesser prizes in the same festival in 1991 and 1999. She has had many exhibitions in Australia and showed in 2001 at the Sammlung Essl Museum in Vienna, Austria. In 2004 Crown Point Press published a series of her prints and exhibited her paintings and prints in its gallery in San Francisco. The Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco exhibited her paintings in 2005. Napangardi’s work is in the collections of several museums, including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, and the Linden-Museum Stuttgart in Germany. She is represented by Gallery Gondwana in Alice Springs and Sydney, Australia.