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APY Lands Aboriginal Art · The desert’s modern powerhouse
The Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands cover roughly 103,000 square kilometres of South Australia’s far north-west, running along the Northern Territory border south of Uluru.
The lands have been held freehold by Aṉangu, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people, since South Australia’s landmark APY Land Rights Act of 1981. Home to a few thousand people spread across small communities in the Musgrave and Mann Ranges, the region has become, over the past two decades, the most prize-decorated painting region in the country, while also housing Australia’s oldest art centre.
Ernabella: where the art centre began
Old and new is the APY story in one sentence.
At Pukatja (Ernabella), at the eastern end of the Musgrave Ranges, a mission craft room opened in 1948 where Aṉangu women spun wool and made hand-loomed rugs in a freehand pattern that became known as Ernabella Design (Anapalayaku Walka).
That room is now Ernabella Arts, the oldest continuously running Indigenous art centre in Australia, and its history traces the whole arc of the movement: rugs and textiles, then batik from the 1970s, painting, and since 2003 the APY Lands’ only ceramics studio, whose potters, among them Alison Milyika Carroll and Pepai Jangala Carroll, are collected nationally.
Before Papunya, before the acrylic movement, Aṉangu at Ernabella were already making and selling work through their own organisation. For the story of the acrylic movement further north, see Central Desert Art.
1948The Ernabella craft room opens — now Australia’s oldest continuously running Indigenous art centre.1981South Australia’s landmark APY Land Rights Act; the lands are held freehold by Aṉangu.103,000 km²South Australia’s far north-west, along the NT border south of Uluru.The painting boom
Acrylic painting arrived across the APY communities mainly in the 2000s, later than in the NT deserts, and then moved fast. Community art centres opened or expanded through the decade, most now working together (with Ernabella and Aṉangu artists further afield) through the APY Art Centre Collective, which runs city galleries and a studio in Adelaide. The region’s more than 500 working artists made the APY Lands the growth engine of the desert movement’s second generation.
Tjala Arts
Amaṯa
Home of the Ken Family Collaborative and Sylvia Ken, both Wynne Prize winners.
Iwantja Arts
Indulkana
Vincent Namatjira, Kaylene Whiskey and Tiger Yaltangki work here.
Mimili Maku Arts
Mimili
Betty Kuntiwa Pumani, Wynne Prize winner, paints with this centre.
Kaltjiti Arts
Fregon
One of the centres that opened or expanded through the 2000s boom.
Tjungu Palya
Nyapari
Western Musgrave Ranges, part of the APY Art Centre Collective.
Ninuku Arts
Kalka
At the far western end of the lands, near the WA border.
Ernabella Arts
Pukatja · est. 1948
Textiles, batik, painting and the APY Lands’ only ceramics studio.
Spinifex Arts Project
Tjuntjuntjara, WA
Grew directly out of native title documentation in the late 1990s; its collaborative canvases were painted as statements of ownership of Country. The project belongs to the same Aṉangu cultural world and is usually collected alongside APY work.
The style, if one word can cover it, is expansive: large, often collaborative canvases of Tjukurpa and Country, painted in saturated colour with a gestural energy that distinguishes APY work from the classical Papunya-lineage idiom. Collaborative family paintings, several senior women working one monumental canvas together, are a particular APY signature, and some of the most acclaimed works of the past decade were made this way.
The prize run
Institutional recognition came in a rush.
Three Wynne Prizes in four years
APY painters won the Wynne Prize for landscape at the Art Gallery of NSW three times in four years: the Ken Family Collaborative of Tjala Arts, Betty Kuntiwa Pumani of Mimili Maku, and Sylvia Ken of Tjala.
The Archibald Prize, 2020
Vincent Namatjira of Iwantja Arts, great-grandson of Albert Namatjira, won the Archibald Prize, the first Aboriginal artist to win Australia’s best-known art award, with a double portrait of himself and Adam Goodes.
A second reputation, for contemporary edge
Namatjira’s wry, political portraiture, alongside Iwantja colleagues like Kaylene Whiskey, whose paintings mix Tjukurpa with pop culture, and Tiger Yaltangki, announced something the market took a while to absorb: APY art is not only the grand Country painting of the senior women, it is also some of the sharpest, funniest contemporary art in Australia.
The senior painters
Meanwhile senior painters such as Betty Muffler (whose Ngangkari Ngura – Healing Country reached the cover of Vogue Australia and the NGV Triennial) and the Ken sisters, including Yaritji Young, carried the region into every major Australian collection.
What to know as a buyer
APY work reaching the market is overwhelmingly acrylic on linen, sold unstretched and rolled like other desert painting, plus punu (carved wood), tjanpi (woven grass sculpture, through the Tjanpi Desert Weavers), ceramics from Ernabella, and works on paper.
Provenance runs through the community art centres and the galleries they supply; certificates should name the art centre, and the standard checks in our buying guide apply.
On price
The region offers unusual range: emerging-artist works from the art centres start in the hundreds, while the prize-winning senior artists and collaboratives now command five and six figures, with the strongest institutional demand of any current desert painting.
Across the same desert region
This Is Aboriginal Art works with Central and Western Desert artists from our Alice Springs studio, a day’s drive north of the APY Lands, and Aṉangu artists and families move throughout this whole desert region.
