I've worked with many of the artists and the art centers from the ap Wylands over decades now, and I had been made aware that they were working on a really ambitious project of major three by three meter paintings and that they were looking to build a community project and would seek venues later for this major project.
Bruce Johnson MacLean is a weary person from Central Queensland. He's an art curator. His role to work with artists to bring their vision to a wider audience. It's what he's done for most of his life. In twenty twenty one, he was working at the National Gallery as Assistant Director of Indigenous Engagement when he heard about this project coming out of the ap Wylands in the Central Australian desert. It was called in Guapooka or Epic Country. He was excited to see what they were making.
They saw images quite early of the first I believe it was nine paintings that they produced. And the artists of the apy Lands are really well known for bringing a real vibrance and a real color to desert painting. So these desert paintings based on or informed by dreaming stories. In recent years, the apy artists have bought very contemporary ideas into desert painting as well.
I've been fortunate enough to see some ap y in the flesh and up close, and it's exactly as you describe, vivid, seeing all the colors in the desert that you don't know that are there until they pointed out to you. You must have been tremendously excited at the prospect of exhibiting their work.
I was really excited, and when we started seeing the actual works, I was blown away. This is a really kind of ambitious group of artist Many of them are you know, really well known in Australia but also internationally, but by the same sort of token. A lot of artists don't get recognized through a major exhibition until, you know, long after they're dead. So the artists really wanted to make this show to celebrate themselves and each other, you know,
while they were still alive. So they took the initiative of building this exhibition, and you know, it is quite unique in the way that they've gone about doing it. They've just taken it all on themselves and then have gone out and looked for partners in museums and galleries who might want to show that body of work.
Bruce wanted to be that partner and good to Pooker was one of the largest and most significant First Nations community driven art projects to have ever been developed. He jumped at the chance to work with them and bring their art to a massive audience at the National Gallery of Australia.
So the exhibition itself was partially on the walls. It was probably seventy eighty percent installed. When the stories started coming out and everything sort of stopped. A Holt was put on the show.
This is the biggest scandal to rock the Indigenous art world in years, accusations of white hands interfering with Aboriginal art.
In a front page story in the weeknd Australian was the headline white hands on prized Black paintings from the ap Wylands. It may claims the white studio staff were interfering with Indigenous artworks in a significant way and sparked a media campaign and a horror year for the collective. From Schwartz Media, I'm Daniel James. This is seven AM Today curated Bruce John MacLean and reported Gabriela Koslovich on the ap Y Art scandal and the complicated question of
authenticity in the Aboriginal art world. It's Friday, August thirty, Gabriela Koslovich. You've been looking into the whole saga around the Ingura Polka show and it really started with a video. Tell me more about what happened.
Well, about two months before the Nuapulka exhibition was about to start, a video was leaked and stills from that video were published in the Weekend Australian, alongside an extensive front page story with the damning headline white Hands on Black Art, claiming that white staff were interfering with the work of Indigenous artists.
And what design that I put on my painting and then she would come along and then she would paint over it and then start backing in.
And at the center of this story was this highly alarming video which showed two young white studio assistants busily working on and around a large canvas by First Nations artists yaraging young and then and one of the young white women, the art center manager, Rosie Palmer, is seen vigorously applying paint to the canvas in large circular shapes or rock holes, and discussing the composition of the work, for example, asking could it do with another rock hole there?
Or is that going to be too circular? Do have another rock?
Sir?
What? Probably good?
The artist is also there, you can see her out of frame. Nonetheless, this video seemed to be irrefutable proof that white studio assistants were overstepping their role. We later learned that a private art dealer and rival of the Apy Art Center collective had paid an Indigenous man thousand dollars for that video. So it cast out on the success of this collective and the integrity of this collective.
The story became more or less a campaign against the collective, and more than seventy five stories followed, so it was really it became the art scandal of twenty twenty three.
Five indigenous artists and six former studio employees had alleged that there had been white interference.
Allegations of quote, white hands on black art.
The allegations which are the is that white studio staff that literally helped paint some of the works themselves to actually make them more appealing to white bars as a crazy amount of focus for any newspaper to give a story, let alone an art story. What was the content of those stories and tell me a bit more about the narrative that emerged from those stories.
Yes, it was extraordinary and inordinate. The focus essentially was just bedding down these serious allegations that were being made about the Apy Arts Center collective that went beyond the video, and that alleged that white staff routinely were painting substantial parts of Indigenous artists' work, not just at Jolla Arts, which is where that video was taken, but also at the Adelaide headquarters of the Apy Art Center collective. There were also claims that of mismanagement by the ap Art
Center collective and coercive control of Indigenous artists. Then there were stories about how these revelations had decimated the indigenous art market and they set off a chain reaction of investigations into the Apy Art Center collective.
You've got to keep in mind that to just forge your head with the exhibition while all of these stories are happening, means that these stories would have been the story of the exhibition, not the story of those works, not the stories that the artists are wanting to tell.
So the decisions were made to essentially halt the exhibition until some more clarity could be gained and then the calls for inquiries and things began, and the exhibition essentially lost its place in the schedule, and I was then sort of postponed indefinitely or at least into clarity around all of these inquiries and different reviews have been finished.
After the break the investigations and what they meant for the ap Y Art Center collective. There's a lot of people watch the video that was published by The Australian and were shocked. What did you think when you saw it?
People have their own ideas about what they think about abertinal art and how it should be done. But I would certainly label myself as a progressive in their space.
You know.
I want to see abatinal culture and progress and move and evolve, and I want Abortinal people to have all of the means that non Aboriginal people have in their space as well. So you I am very aware that white artists and in urban based appisal artists have studio assistants that do quite a bit of this sort of
work for them. So the fact that desert artists are engaging in contemporary studio practice for me is not a shock at all, and I find it quite exciting the idea that desert artists are wanting to use all of the opportunities that are available to them to progress their painting.
Right, because the claims are that this was interference in the making of this art. So how would you describe the way these artists used white assistance.
There hasn't been a lot of direct involvement by I think white studio assistants in a lot of the works. There's some preparatory work, there's edging work, there's a bit of touching up of spilled things or untidy things. But this was probably one of the first instances where why studio assistants were directly assisting the artist. And it sounds really interesting when you say it like that, because these are people who are employed to assist in the studio,
to assist these artists. So if not assisting them, what are they doing there? That didn't bother me at all, but it shocked and outraged a lot of people in the industry. But at the same time, it was really ignoring the artists. And you know, my conversations with the artists, with the managers of art centers, there was a real sense of frustration that nobody was listening to them through.
It, Gabrielle, you said, the series of stories and the claims made in them went to a number of investigations. So what exactly unfolded?
Within a week of The Australian's first story in April last year, the National Gallery of Australia launched an independent investigation into the collective, and this was headed by two prominent lawyers, whose team delivered a thirty four page report last August and found that the indigenous artists, without exception, had said that the paintings had been produced by them.
The reviewers strongly rejected allegations that artists had engaged in cover ups or dishonest practice, saying those claims had no proper foundation. But the following month, in May last year, the South Australian government announced its own review into the management of the APY collective in partnership with the Northern Territory and federal governments.
The South Australia and Territory governments have combined forces with the Commonwealth to launch an investigation into allegations of white people interfering with Indigenous art at the ap art Center Collective.
There were also claims that the collective was not supporting a culturally safe, respectful and oropriate workplace for artists working on the Apy Lands, in the art centers there and also in the Adelaide studio. But this South Australian government appointed panel came back with no findings, and curiously, the
panel did not deliver a written report. It did, however, refer the matter to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and to the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations, and after looking at all of that material, the hble C came to its findings that no breaches of consumer law had been committed.
So as we sit here, there haven't been any findings of wrongdoing against the collective.
No, that's absolutely right, Daniel. After more than a year and after intensive investigations and scrutiny of this organization, nothing has come back.
Tell us what the swath of investigations, what kind of impact I've had for the APY Collective.
Just before I go into that, I want to quote one of the ap y Lands artists, Selling Scales, who said last year that the APY Collective was the most scrutinized arts organization in the country and it certainly did start to feel like that it's been a terrible time for the collective and the whole saga wasn't great for the indigenous art industry because in a sense, the whole industry was under a cloud and art collectors were ringing up the art centers on the Apy Lands and making,
you know, wanting documentation to prove that their works were authentic, and so forth. The organization lost its station, federal funding, its corporate sponsors pulled out. Sky Omara, the general manager of the Apy Art Collective, told me, you know, they were good, intelligent, talented women with integrity and an amazing work ethic, and they were almost destroyed by these untrue stories. The collective has managed to stay open though, through the
income of sales. Skyromara mentioned that sales increased last year by three hundred thousand dollars and she's still hopeful that the Nauapulka exhibition will go ahead someday as planned at the National Gallery of Australia and that the paintings will be bought by the gallery as as had also been planned.
Gabriella, thank you so much for your time.
Thanks Bruce.
She left the gallery after the exhibition was put on ice did this Saga have any role to play in your leaving.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, seeing this exhibition developed by community, seeing this incredible celebration of who they are, of their stories, of their art, and of themselves and each other, Seeing that not only postponed by the gallery, but played politic with so big in the media, and it was a real gut wrenching feeling to not only see that happen, but to have to talk to artists
about why that's happening. You know, that's all the opposite of the things that I've dedicated my life to to celebrating culture, to sharing it, to sharing the joy of aberteinbal art and life that was kind of ripped away through a lot of that process. So absolutely that has some bearing on departing the gallery.
What will happen to the Apy exhibition now?
Brute? The Naurapook exhibition has always been owned by the community, by the artists. As I understand, they are talking to a few international partners about showing the exhibition in international museums.
And one of the really exciting things that tap through that is that there are curators and spaces in places like the US who are really engaged with things like critical race theory, but also have experience of Murdoch media as well, so they are really keen to examine some of the pieces of this exhibition and of the coverage of this poul Saga through I think a really mature lens.
So I think that's quite exciting that not only the art will be celebrated, but there will be a level of critical discourse around desert artists engaging in contemporary studio practice, around the intervention of the media into Indigenous art and art centers and Indigenous owned businesses, and an opportunity for community to present their story through these spaces that I think perhaps if it is shown in Australia, and I'm sure it will be shown in Australia at some point,
a lot of the conversation will center around the media fewer or rather than the artworks. So I hope that there's an opportunity for some balance between those things, but also for a really mature critical discussion around what's happening and what has happened.
Well, it might be the case of being one of those things that we don't know what we've got until it's gone. Bruce, thank you so much for your time really appreciate it. You're very welcome. Also in the years today, protesters have displayed portraits of a twenty three year old asylum seeker who died on Wednesday after sitting himself on
fire outside the Department of Home Affairs office in Malbourne. Manow, Younger Liningndham have been part of an active protest urging the Labour government to give permanent visas to asylum seekers stuck in Limbo since arriving by boat. Monow himself has spent more than eleven years in Australia on temporary bridging visas, and Senator Jackie Lamby says she will no longer run
state candidates and Tasmanian politics. The announcement comes after two stadiumps We're kicked out of her namesake party, the Jackie Lamby Network and will now continue on as independents. Seven Am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and the Saturday paper. Is produced by Shane Anderson, Zultan Fecho and Zaia Tangra. Our technical producer is Atticus Bastow. We are edited by Chris Dangate and Sarah McPhee. Eric Jensen is
our editor in chief. Our mixer is Travis Evans. Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of envelope BOARDY seven Am was hosted by Ruby Jones and myself, Daniel James. See you next week.