Image: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art
The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman will open ‘From the Australian Desert: Contemporary Aboriginal Painting’ on October 16, bringing more than 120 works of Indigenous Australian art to the museum through March 14, 2027. The exhibition is presented as a celebration of 50 years of Papunya Tula Artists, the Aboriginal-owned art enterprise formed in Australia’s Central Desert in 1971.
According to the museum’s exhibition page, Papunya Tula Artists emerged in Papunya, where a small group of Aboriginal men began translating ancestral ceremonial and ritual designs into acrylic paintings on cardboard, linoleum and Masonite. Those early works, the museum says, helped establish a movement that is now recognized internationally for its use of color, line and abstraction. The exhibition title on the museum site appears in Pintupi as ‘Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu,’ meaning past and present together, underscoring the show’s focus on continuity between ancestral stories and contemporary practice.
The local presentation is organized around Indigenous principles rather than chronology. The museum says the paintings are arranged by genealogy, place and ancestral journeys, a structure intended to reveal the enduring relationship between artists, Country and Tjukurrpa, the ancestral stories that shape the works. The exhibition text presents the movement not as a historical episode completed in the past, but as a living practice formed in the aftermath of colonization and sustained across generations.
The show will include works by generations of Aboriginal artists, with the exhibition page highlighting more than 120 paintings and describing several as iconic works of Indigenous Australian art. One featured image on the museum site is Michael Jagamara Nelson’s ‘Four Stories at Pikilyi’ from 1988. The museum says the exhibition’s breadth is meant to introduce audiences to the diversity of contemporary Aboriginal painting and the visual languages that developed from Papunya Tula’s early experiments.
The exhibition is organized by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia in partnership with Papunya Tula Artists. The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art says the local presentation is made possible in part by the museum’s Museum Association and by generous donors to the museum’s endowment.
In an August newsletter from museum director Thomas Brent Smith, the museum said it was preparing for the arrival of ‘From the Australian Desert’ after the close of ‘On the Edge: The Abstract World of Frederick Hammersley,’ which runs through September 6. Smith wrote that the new exhibition would introduce audiences to the rich diversity of contemporary Aboriginal painting from Australia and offer new perspectives, stories and ways of understanding the world through art. The museum lists the run of ‘From the Australian Desert: Contemporary Aboriginal Painting’ as October 16, 2026, through March 14, 2027.
