2014 - 2016
Black Art White Walls
The Adrian & Anne Newstead Indigenous Art Collection
Drawing on the extensive personal collection of Indigenous art accumulated by Adrian and Anne Newstead whist working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists over a period of 30 years, this exhibition, curated by Djon Mundine OAM, toured regional galleries through NSW, Victoria, and Queensland between 2014 and 2016.
The entire collection built through personal relationships, serendipity, and a keen sense of historical and cultural importance, comprised more than 1000 canvas paintings, barks, artefacts, prints, posters, and sculptures. As such, it stood distinctly apart from those of casual collectors. It was a platform by which a different narrative could be told; that of art as an expression of relationships, culture, spirituality, the land, and kinship.
The 70 works that were selected by Mundine for the touring exhibition represented a linear history of Aboriginal art and craft from the earliest days of the movement, through to the establishment of the earliest art centres and beyond this, to the mainstreaming of Aboriginal art and its national and international acceptance as a dynamic contemporary art movement.
As Adrian Newstead had been instrumental in initiating printmaking amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and had published hundreds of limited editions, as well as organising and promoting Australian Indigenous prints on the international stage, the exhibition included rare examples of early prints as well as those by the most important artists of the movement.
The exhibition was first shown at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery in January 2014, before embarking on a national tour.