Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia

When I was younger, my dad went back to school to get his bachelor’s and one of the classes he took was in native studies. I was homeschooled so my brother and I would always tag along with him to his classes and do our own school work in the hallways while we waited for him to get out of class. For one of his projects, I remember he had to do extensive research on Aboriginal art, so we took multiple trips to the Aboriginal art museum on Pantops. It was one of the smallest museums I’ve ever visited, and it was completely tucked away out of sight. But it had a cozy welcoming atmosphere and we even got to meet a few of the Indigenous Australian artists who explained some of their work. While I don’t remember what was said, the bright, expressive artwork sticks out in my mind. It was difficult to place when these pieces were made. This creative expression wasn’t bound by the ‘traditional/modern’ binary and its imaginative quality went beyond the territorial boundaries of colonialism.

It evoked the fugitive aesthetic, rejecting the struggle for inclusions or recognition and fighting for refusal and flights as modes of freedom. Rather than relying on a written language, this artwork served as visual language and was used as a way of preserving their culture through visual storytelling, passed down generations. One thing I found fascinating was the hallmark style of dot painting, which began when the Aboriginal people were concerned that the white man would be able to understand their sacred and private knowledge. Often, the technique of over-dotting was used to obscure the iconography underneath. This is a way in which Indigenous art is a form of protest. It embodies the quote found in our reading “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the terrain of Decolonial Struggle Through Indigenous Art”: “[decolonial] art arms silence with voices that, even when the bodies that carry them are crushed and ground to powder, will rise again, and multiply, and sing out their presence… art in this sense is silence that screams.”

I also appreciate that their site goes into extensive detail on the importance of acknowledging Indigenous custodians, not simply just to go through the motions but it provides information on how we ourselves can do land acknowledgment the right way. Its tips on doing a land acknowledgment weren’t one-sided but it suggested a “Welcome to Country '' where an Indigenous member of a group who is custodians of the local land would give a short speech in English or their Indigenous language acknowledging the audience and welcoming them to their land.