To coincide with Desert Painters of Australia, an exhibition of contemporary Indigenous Australian art at 976 Madison Avenue, Gagosian will present a conversation between leading authorities Fred Myers and Henry Skerritt. Their conversation will be introduced and moderated by Margo Smith, director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. The event has reached capacity. To view a live-stream of the event, visit Gagosian’s Instagram.
Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology at NYU, has been doing research with Pintupi-speaking people on their art, their relationships to land, and other matters since 1973. Myers has published two books, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986) and Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Duke University Press, 2002).
Henry F. Skerritt recieved his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017. He is Curator of the Indigenous Arts of Australia at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. Henry has written extensively on contemporary Indigenous art and has edited such significant volumes as No Boundaries: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Abstract Painting (Prestel, 2015) and Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia (Prestel, 2016).