Janet Golder Kngwarreye, Aboriginal Artist

Janet Golder Kngwarreye is an Alyawarre artist who comes from the prominent artistic Kngwarreye family; Janet is the great granddaughter of perhaps the most acclaimed Aboriginal artist, Emily Kame Kngwarreye (deceased), and is also the granddaughter of highly regarded painter, Polly Ngale. Janet's country is around Boundary Bore, in the Aboriginal homelands region of Utopia, a few hundred kilometres north-east from Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Janet's sister, Belinda Golder Kngwarreye, is also a notable artist. Janet is married to Ronnie Bird who is the son of famous artist, Ada Bird Petyarre (deceased) — the eldest of the seven celebrated Petyarre sisters.

Janet was born on 15 November 1973 at Mulga Bore, the daughter of Margaret Golder and Sammy Pitjara, and the painting lineage around her is even denser than her Kngwarreye name suggests: her grandparents include Old Henry Pitjara and two celebrated Ngale sisters — Polly and Angelina — while her uncle was the noted painter Greeny Purvis. Janet and Ronnie have four children — Rochelle, Renady, Katrina and Troytan — and Janet now lives in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), travelling back to her Country regularly.

Growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Janet was around during the Utopia Women's Batik Group, a landmark project that greatly influenced the early contemporary Aboriginal art movements, and brought recognition to some of the most widely recognised Aboriginal artists and Janet's relatives such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Polly Ngale and Gloria Petyarre. Janet would sit and watch her family members paint, learning the stories and Dreamings. She took up the brush herself in 1987, at around fourteen, absorbing the subjects of the women around her from the very years when Utopia's art was moving from silk to canvas — and she is among the last generation of Utopia painters who learned partly by watching Emily Kame Kngwarreye at work.

Acquiring this knowledge, Janet now paints several different stories including Awelye  (women's body paint designs), Bush Medicine Leaves, Yam Dreaming and My Country, and her repertoire has continued to widen — taking in the Bush Yam Leaf and the Mountain Devil Dreaming of her Petyarre relations by marriage. In recent years she has pushed the My Country works into new territory, combining the imagery of women's cultural practice and bush tucker with the features of the Utopia landscape, and fusing bold black-and-white design with passages of saturated colour. Her recent exhibition record includes Painting on Country: Utopia Artists (Japingka Gallery, Perth, 2018), Landscape Colours (2019), Cup of Joy: New Works from Rising Stars (2020) and Top 20 at Art Mob in Hobart (2021) — and in a playful measure of her reach, she has even painted a Smeg FAB28 refrigerator, her Utopia designs wrapped around an Italian icon. Janet's work has been widely exhibited, and she remains a much sought-after artist.