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This section includes all the artists with their artist statements. You can use this section as a slide show to share the artists' works with your students. 

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This section includes all the artists with their artist statements. You can use this section as a slide show to share the artists' works with your students. 

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Needs updating for 2026

This prize is for an outstanding artwork by an Australian senior secondary student working with a landscape theme in their visual art practice.

Entries for the $500 Student Prize presented by the University of Tasmania are open now, closing Friday 5 July 2024.

Enter online at hadleysartprize.com.au/education

This is a significant opportunity for an Australian senior secondary student to have their artwork nationally recognised. It is a terrific honour to have their artwork displayed alongside some of Australia’s leading professional artists shortlisted as finalists in this year’s Hadley’s Art Prize.

– Dr Abbey MacDonald, Senior Lecturer in Art Education at the University of Tasmania 2024 Hadley’s Student Prize Winner presented by the University of Tasmania

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Art Education Australia (AEA) would like to thank Hadley’s Art Prize (HAP) for the opportunity to collaborate in the

ongoing expansion and iteration of a unique annual education resource. We acknowledge and thank Associate Professor

Kathryn Coleman (AEA President) and the wider AEA Executive and Committee for their ongoing support, leadership,

advocacy and contributions made to the development of this resource.

Revised each year with updated content, resources and activities for the HAP finalists’ exhibition, 2024 marks the sixth

edition of this education resource. The ongoing development of this resource involves consultation and conversation

with artists and art educators from across Australia.

AEA and HAP would like to acknowledge the collective effort and thank the following art educators for contributing their

time and expertise in reviewing iterations of this education resource: Alise Hardy, Robyn Carmody, Sarah Brooke, Kate

Camm, Dr Linda Clark, Dr Heejin Chang, Gail Harradine, Sue Pavlovich, Theresa Sainty and Michelle Walker. We thank

Dr Heejin Chang for the development of a bespoke glossary for students learning English as a second language.

We would like to thank Dr Jan Hogan for contributing the ‘Drawing a Line’ activity to the 2024 iteration of our education

resource. Thanks also to Archipelago Productions for facilitating a rich, interdisciplinary discussion between visual arts

and drama by supporting students to experience the Past the Shallows play, directed by Ben Winspear.

All iterations of the HAP education resource build upon the foundation collaborative efforts of Dr Amy Jackett (Curator,

Hadley’s Art Prize), Dr Abbey MacDonald (Senior Lecturer in Art Education at the University of Tasmania and former

President of Art Education Australia) and Professor Margaret Baguley (Professor in Arts Education, Curriculum and

Pedagogy at the University of Southern Queensland current Vice President of Art Education Australia).

We thank these educators, scholars and artists for their generous sharing of expertise at various points over the past six

years. Their contributions have been instrumental in articulating points of tension and resonance between curriculum

and syllabus content, informing the development of activities that support realisation of intended learning outcomes,

and possible directions for student and teacher inquiry; all of which are considered and contextualised in relation to the

emerging themes, cultural storylines, media and practices enacted by HAP artists each year.

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Guide to evaluating and selecting education resources (2022) Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [AITSIS]

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Guide to evaluating and selecting education resources (2022) Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies [AITSIS]

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In October 2022 AIATSIS published the Guide to evaluating and selecting education resources (the Guide). The Guide assists non-Indigenous educators, and others to critically self-reflect on history and the effects that this has on pedagogical practises today.

It allows teachers to ensure curriculum resources selected for teaching do not cause harm to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, but rather foster trust and build a sense of pride for all.

The Guide is underpinned by pivotal resources including:

The Curriculum Corporation's 1995 publication, A Resource Guide for Aboriginal Studies and Torres Strait Islander Studies;

The Queensland Studies Authority's 2007 document, Guidelines Indigenous Perspectives: Selecting and evaluating resources; and

The AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research.

The Guide supports educators to make conscious and critical decisions when selecting curriculum resources, to ensure they reflect all children, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and cause no harm.

The Guide will also assist teachers to select appropriate resources for teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures, and languages respectfully and effectively.

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AIATSIS Guide to evaluating and selecting education resources

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In October 2022 AIATSIS published the Guide to evaluating and selecting education resources (the Guide). The Guide assists non-Indigenous educators, and others to critically self-reflect on history and the effects that this has on pedagogical practises today.

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Click here to go back to the AEA Hadley's Art Prize Home Page

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Commonwealth of Australia (2023) Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place – Australia’s cultural policy for

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Commonwealth of Australia (2023) Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place – Australia’s cultural policy for

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the next five years.

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100,000 Australian landscape art prize presented by Hadley's Orient Hotel in Hobart, Tasmania.

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2022 Winner Adam Howell receiving his award from artist Neil Haddon. Photo: Jessica King

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needs updating for 2025

This senior secondary art prize creates an authentic opportunity for students to put forward their work for consideration in a national field of entries, and will undoubtedly give the winning student the confidence to continue their creative practice.

– Dr Amy Jackett (Hadley’s Art Prize Curator)

Entries are shortlisted by art education experts at the University of Tasmania and the winner decided by the 2024 Hadley’s Art Prize judges.

Exposure for the winning student artwork is extended internationally through being featuring on the cover of the Australian Art Education journal, which has a strong international artist, art teacher and art educationresearcher readership base. The winning artwork features on the cover of Australian Art Education Vol 42. No.2.

Judges consider the student’s creativity and technical skill, seeking artwork that is imaginative or profound in its response to contemporary art themes with a high level of conceptual and practical resolution. The 2024 winner of the Hadley’s Art Prize will feature in next year’s iteration of the HAP Education Resource and a forthcoming issue of the Australian Art Education journal.

Senior visual arts students can choose to focus on the development of their artistic practice through a course of study related to art studio practice. An alternative approach can either focus on art theory and criticism in relation to an applied approach to visual art, such as engaging with and learning about community art practices and processes. This is where interconnections between making and responding can be actioned, extended and interrogated, enabling students to foster innovative relationships between creative artforms and discipline areas beyond the arts. Teachers are invited to adapt and contextualise the senior-secondary activities to align with and support the address of key ideas and intended outcomes of their respective state/territory visual art courses.

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the arts. Australia Council for the Arts. Australian Government

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Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the arts. Australia Council for the Arts. Australian Government

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Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts

"While works by individual artists are protected by copyright, Australia does not yet have a law that prevents alteration, distortion or misuse of traditional symbols, songs, dances, performances and story that may be part of the heritage of particular Indigenous language groups.

This is where the Australia Council for the Arts' Protocols for using First Nations Intellectual and Cultural Property in the Arts comes in.

The protocols provide a pathway for collaborations and creation of new Indigenous work."
Dr Terri Janke

Background

First published in 2002 and revised in 2007, this protocol guide endorses the rights of First Nations people to their cultural heritage and supports First Nations creative practice.

This protocol guide encourages self-determination and helps build a strong and diverse Indigenous arts sector. These are key goals and priority areas of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Creative practitioners who work with First Nations artists or engage with Indigenous cultural heritage in projects, and are funded by Australia Council grant assessment panels are required to comply with this protocol guide as a condition of funding.

Over the years, the principles and protocols contained in this protocol guide have also been applied nationally and internationally - educating readers and users on Indigenous Australian cultural heritage, and encouraging meaningful collaborations with First Nations artists and creators.

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Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts

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While works by individual artists are protected by copyright, Australia does not yet have a law that prevents alteration, distortion or misuse of traditional symbols, songs, dances, performances and story that may be part of the heritage of particular Indigenous language groups.

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Learn more about this year’s panel of art specialist judges.

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2024 Hadley's Student Prize Winner Innes Winchcombe

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2024 Hadley's Student Prize Winner Innes Winchcombe

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Innes Winchcombe, Year 11, age 16, NSW

Artwork title: Nature's Secret Passage

Artist statement:

My work explores themes of urban decay and natural regrowth. Natures Secret Passage depicts Old Helensburgh Station, opened in 1889 but closed in 1915 due to an over amount of soot and debris in the tunnel. The tunnel acts as a direct insight into our past of transportation, and allows for the viewer to imagine what it would have been like to go through this tunnel 100 years ago.

Judges’ comments:

Innes’s photographic artwork skilfully captures the juxtaposition of urban decay and natural regrowth, presenting a poignant commentary on the passage of time and the resilience of nature. The composition draws the viewer into the abyss of an abandoned tunnel, where the brick infrastructure of a bygone era stands in stark contrast to the vibrant foliage reclaiming the space. This interplay between the artificial and the natural, the forgotten and the flourishing, imbues the artwork with a sense of both melancholy and hope, making it a compelling piece.

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Adam Howell, Monolith Acrylic paint on canvas 140 x 80 cm

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2022 Hadley's Student Prize Winner Adam Howell

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2022 Hadley's Student Prize Winner Adam Howell

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2023 Hadley's Student Prize winner Azi Hudson

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2023 Hadley's Student Prize winner Azi Hudson

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2023 Winner

Azi Hudson, Cardijn College, SA

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Community Guidelines

Be kind and constructive in any comments.

Only share student work with permission.

Avoid uploading full names or identifying student information.

Respect cultural protocols—especially when sharing work related to place, Country, or Indigenous artists.

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Needs Updating for 2026

As you explore the exhibition and the work of the artists, you will find themes that connect the work. You might like to explore these themes with your class.

Atmosphere

Texture

Mark Making

Creating/working in situ

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Are you a student or teacher using this Padlet? Use this section to share artwork you have created individually or with students in response to any of the provocations on this resource, to share your ideas, and support the work of others.

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Artist: Agnes Rubuntja Artwork title: Bush Medicine

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Artist: Agnes Rubuntja

Artwork title: Bush Medicine

Medium: acrylic on canvas

Size: 111 x 111 cm

Year: 2024

Artist statement:
Seeds, bush medicine - bush medicine seeds and Frew River. Frew River running, bush flowers everywhere, them bush seeds everywhere, we eat em'. We smash them seeds, make damper. We go bush – Epenarra (Wutunugurra), here (Owairtilla) – we get them seeds. Get them green leaf too, boil em' up. Sweet potato underneath, flowers on top. Sugarbag honey from tree, the white tree. Kids follow us, teach em' when we go out walking, hunting, painting. Show em' bush tucker everywhere, show em’ painting there again. That purple and blue (depicted), we get em' from coloured water stone for ceremony, body paint.

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Artist: Alice Mannheim Artwork title: Log it!

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Artist: Alice Mannheim

Artwork title: Log it!

Medium: oil paint on canvas

Size: 84 x 119 cm

Year: 2025

Artist statement:
Log it! Is a love letter to the chaotic beauty of the natural world, capturing the untouched environment of Queensland’s Daintree Rainforest. Inspired by the grand depictions of nature by Romantic artists such as John Constable, alongside contemporary influences including Harold Thornton’s portrait of Dr Bob Brown, Log it! aims to convey the immersive experience of a tropical rainforest where colour, texture, temperature, moisture and scent overwhelm the senses. It reminds viewers of the rainforest’s diverse and irreplaceable details – elements of nature that are beautiful and fragile, and increasingly at risk of being lost.

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Artist: Kumantjayi Lane Artwork title: Pirrnpirrnga – Desert Bore

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Artist: Kumantjayi Lane

Artwork title: Pirrnpirrnga – Desert Bore

Medium: acrylic paint on Belgian linen

Size: 76 x 121 cm

Year: 2026   Artist statement:
This painting depicts the ‘pin pin’ desert bore outstation near Kintore. This is Ann Lane’s Tjukurrpa and country. Pirrnpirrnga has mountains, rocks and a big rock hole, where there is always water. In the Tjukurrpa the snakes are travelling around the sand hill country, looking for water. Ann remembers visiting this country and seeing her aunty singing by those rock holes.

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kumantjai lane - pirrnpirrnga - desert bore

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Artist: Betty Campbell Artwork title: Minymaku Inma

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Artist: Betty Campbell

Artwork title: Minymaku Inma

Medium: synthetic polymer on linen

Size: 152 x 122 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
Inma inkapai ngayulu. I sing ceremony. I practice inma all the time, and I paint it on canvas. This work comes from women’s ceremony—song, dancing, and rhythm in the body. I am a cultural woman. I carry this knowledge and keep it strong. My painting follows the movement of inma. This is my practice. Uwa, palyo. This inma is about Mimili, the place I grew up. When we sing maku inma, we make the country strong. The land listens and responds. This painting holds that song, keeping Mimili stories alive and well.

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Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) blank flow chart

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A guide to planning: Start with the Artist: Using the AGSA flow chart

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A guide to planning: Start with the Artist: Using the AGSA flow chart

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The Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) provides a useful approach to exploring the work of an artist as a starting point for developing ideas for creating authentic arts learning experiences for students, without appropriating the artist's work. The flow chart asks the following questions:

Who is the artist?

What are the main ideas, themes or concepts in the artist's work?

How does this relate to the world of my students?

What are some ways students could respond to these issues - without creating copies of the artist's work?

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Appropriation in Visual Arts Practice: When is it appropriate to appropriate?

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Appropriation in Visual Arts Practice: When is it appropriate to appropriate?

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Appropriation refers to the arts practice of using pre-existing images such as artworks, images from popular culture, media or other objects and incorporating them into a new artwork to make new meaning. The pre-existing images or objects might be reworked, used in part or as a whole. In this way, artists can create a conversation between the original artists' intentions and meanings and their own meanings and interpretations.

As an arts practice, appropriation must always respect artists rights and copyright laws. NAVA has fact sheets for students and teachers to help navigate this space. There is also a general agreement that appropriation should only be attempted when there is a full understanding of the significance of the image or object by either being a part of the culture or community it belongs to or by acquiring deep knowledge about it through the teachings of those from said culture/community.

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Art Appropriation and Cultural Appropriation

Theodore Gracyk

Chapter Goals

Define appropriation in in a descriptive, non-evaluative way

Understand that appropriation is common in the arts

Understand major types of artistic appropriation

Define culture

Understand that cultural identities are complex

Define cultural appropriation

Put simply, to appropriate is to take something and to claim it as one's own.

In a famous image created by Jean-François Millet in 1855, three peasant women search for wheat in a field after the crop has been harvested. They are gathering food that would otherwise go to waste. Their activity gives the image its title: "The Gleaners." (See figure 1.1.) The women illustrate appropriation: they are engaged in the ancient practice of appropriating crops that remain after the harvest. The previous day, the wheat belonged to the farmer. Today, they are permitted to take whatever they can find.

There are many ways to appropriate something. Someone might buy it, or steal it, or take it because no one else has made a claim to it. It might be land or a physical object, and someone takes control of it and makes it their own tangible property. Or someone could just use a vacant building without asking permission: squatting is a mode of appropriation.

While squatting is a morally questionable activity, this chapter does not discuss which of these acts of appropriation are misappropriation, that is, wrongful taking or use. In order to provide an overview of the basic concept, ethical issues are delayed until later in the book. Throughout this book, phrases such as "cultural appropriation" and "voice appropriation" are used in a descriptive, non-evaluative way.

Appropriation frequently involves taking material to use when making something else. Presumably, the wheat is gathered to make flour and then to bake bread. Moving to a larger scale, many ancient ruins are in bad shape because local people took old buildings apart to use the materials in new buildings. For example, the three great pyramids at Giza, Egypt, were white when they were new. They had an outer layer of white limestone. However, most of this outer layer was stripped off in the 14th century, hauled ten miles north to Cairo, and used in the construction of new mosques. In other words, the pyramids are now light brown in color because their surface layer was appropriated. And, of course, this was many centuries after the contents of their burial chambers were appropriated, that is, looted by thieves.

However, appropriation is not limited to land and physical, tangible things. People can buy, borrow, and steal ideas. This also extends to appropriation of the mode of expression of those ideas. Famously, the cubist art movement arose when Pablo Picasso appropriated the appearance of West-African masks for the faces of two of the women in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). However, appropriation of a design or mode of expression frequently separates it from its original meaning. Picasso copied the designs for his own purposes, eliminating their religious significance and distorting what these masks meant to the people who made them.

The Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani moved to Paris at about this time. He, too, became interested in the art of West Africa, and there was a noticeable change in his style. He studied and sketched many African masks. Soon afterward, the faces of his portraits displayed a style appropriation from these sources. (See figures 1.2 and 1.3). The appropriation is clearly evident in the stretching of the faces, the long, thin noses, and the vacant, almond-shaped eyes.

This book itself includes many appropriations. Some of the text in some chapters is derived from other open source books. In order to provide Figure 1.1, an existing image from a museum website has been recycled to show Millet's etching. It is straightforward content appropriation. As with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, these appropriations of text and images are non-tangible.

In contemporary society, designs and other original expressions of an idea are generally protected as intellectual property. The right to control and profit from one's original expression of an idea is associated with copyright protection or patent protection. Generally, these "ownership" protections for intellectual property expire after some fixed length of time and the design or the expression of an idea then enters public domain. Public domain works are ones that anyone can appropriate without seeking permission or paying for their use. Ironically, an image of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon does not appear here because it remains under copyright until 2044.

Story-telling is another common field of non-tangible appropriation. Stories are frequently appropriated and rewritten. William Shakespeare's play Tragedy of Macbeth fictionalized a true incident in Scottish history, and then the play was appropriated and rewritten to become Akira Kurosawa's film Throne of Blood (1957). Musical appropriation is also common. The Beach Boys' first nation-wide hit was the song "Surfin' U.S.A." (1963). Although Chuck Berry never wrote about surfing, the music of Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen" (1958) was appropriated for "Surfin' U.S.A." and Berry successfully demanded the songwriting credit and all royalties.

The lesson here is that the contrasting cases of gleaning stalks of wheat and rewriting the words to "Sweet Little Sixteen" illustrate a basic contrast between tangible and non-tangible appropriation. What they have in common is that, either way, something that already exists is taken. Sometimes there is compensation for doing so, but sometimes there is not.

This book focuses on non-tangible appropriation in American culture. More specifically, the focus is on appropriation of cultural activities and products that we recognize as art, including the popular arts.

In much the same way that something physical can be appropriated and then used to make something new, ideas and their expression can be appropriated and used to create new cultural products, designs, and intellectual property. This is extremely common in the arts. For example, a visual artist may appropriate a story from one source and a design idea from another source and, combining them, create a unique picture. This is art appropriation.

To get started, here is a simple and obvious example. The art of printmaking flourished in Japan in the 18th and 19th centuries. For much of that time, the publishing industry did not operate with copyright laws of the kind we have today. For that reason, together with a general cultural acceptance of copying images in the production of new ones, original print designs were often "borrowed" by other print artists. It should be noted that Japanese print artists of this period did not make any physical prints themselves. They designed new prints by making line drawings. They sold the drawings to print shops, and the shops created the printing materials and then produced the physical prints. For purposes of simplicity, references to these prints routinely downplay the extent to which printmaking was a collaborative process As was the case when they were produced, the artist who made the basic drawing receives credit for the print.

In 1833-1834, Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige designed a revolutionary and popular series of prints that illustrated landmarks along a major travel route, the Tokaido road. One of the best known of these prints is the sixteenth print in the series, Kanbara. It shows a small village during a deep snowfall. (See figure 1.4.) A few years later, Utagawa Kunisada appropriated Hiroshige's designs from the Tokaido prints and used them as backgrounds for his own series of Tokaido prints. (See figure 1.5.) The two artists share the name "Utagawa" not because they are related, but because it indicates that they were both students trained in the Utagawa school or workshop. These are their professional names. Kunisada also claimed the name Toyokuni the 2nd, and Hiroshige often signed himself Ichiyūsai Hiroshige.

No one in 19th-century Japan would have seen anything wrong with Kunisada's appropriation from Hiroshige. In fact, there were no hard feelings between the competing commercial artists and they later worked together as a team to design a new "two brushes" set of Tokaido prints.

This example shows that different cultures have different attitudes about artistic originality and appropriation. It is a mistake to assume that universal standards govern what counts as misappropriation.

In most of today's world, this level of direct appropriation from a competitor would likely lead to a lawsuit if it was not negotiated and approved in advance. For example, there is a famous image of President Barack Obama by the artist Shepard Fairey, with the word "hope" at the bottom. Fairey created it by appropriating a photograph by Mannie Garcia. Because the photo was incorporated without prior permission, Fairey was sued for copyright infringement. Fairey responded that because he had changed the image in several ways, he was operating at a level of appropriation that falls within the "fair use" doctrine. He claimed that he had transformed what he had appropriated enough to be an original artwork. In the end, Fairey avoided a court trial on the matter by reaching a settlement. While we did not get to learn whether the American courts would endorse his appropriation as fair use, copyright does not prohibit all forms of direct artistic appropriation, especially for older art and for the performing arts. All of the visual examples that appear in this chapter are of older works that can be reproduced (that is, appropriated) without payment or prior permission because the art is old enough that it is not subject to copyright protection. But, of course, the fact that some appropriations are legal under U.S. or international law does not mean that is morally right to appropriate what others have created.

The focus of this book is cultural appropriation, a version of artistic appropriation that is common when two cultures interact. Cultural appropriation occurs when someone appropriates from a different culture than their own.

Cultural appropriation can be divided into several distinct categories, and the remainder of this chapter outlines these variations. The current section and the next one (1.3 and 1.4) will introduce the basic idea of cultural appropriation, the next after that (1.5) will expand on the idea of culture that is being used here, and then the remaining sections will go into more detail about the varieties of cultural appropriation.

Put most simply, cultural appropriation is appropriation of cultural products and practices by people who are "outsiders" to that culture. It is intercultural appropriation. It happens whenever people take from or imitate the cultural products of another culture. Showing the practices of another culture in pictures and stories can also be a form of cultural appropriation.

Not all appropriation is intercultural. Therefore, not all appropriation is cultural appropriation. A great deal of art appropriation is "internal" to a society. When Kunisada copied Hiroshige, the two print designers were working within the same society and culture (Edo-era Japan). So, although Kunisada was engaging in art appropriation, it was not cultural appropriation. On the other hand, appropriation of Hiroshige's designs soon spread beyond Edo-era Japan and continues even now. Today, there are bath towels, shower curtains, coffee mugs, and yoga mats decorated with Hiroshige's "Kanbara." Whether the production of these items is cultural appropriation depends on who is making them, and to whom they market them. If the yoga mat is being produced by a Japanese firm for sale in Japan, that use is a continuation of Japanese cultural heritage and not cultural appropriation. However, when a twentieth-century American designer appropriates the "Kanbara" image to sell products to an American market, that is cultural appropriation. There are many examples of this, such as the cover design for the music album Pinkerton (1996) by the American rock group Weezer.

Cultural appropriation is an ancient practice and has probably taken place since early societies split off into distinct cultures. Physical appropriation of culture is the simplest type to understand, so it will once again serve as the starting point for better understanding when appropriation is, and isn't, cultural appropriation.

When archeologists open up ancient burial sites, one of the goals is to learn about the lives and social practices of ancient peoples. For example, large mounds on an estate in east central England turned out to be a medieval burial site. It has been named Sutton Hoo, using old English to designate the mounds and location. The most remarkable thing about Sutton Hoo is that one person was of such importance that his grave consisted of an entire ship, hauled inland and buried under a huge mound of earth. The grave also contained weapons, household items, and jewelry. Another surprise was that these items proved that, long after the collapse of the Roman Empire, eastern England remained connected to trade routes that reached across the world (Williams 2011). The grave contained Merovingian coins (from present-day France), silverware from the eastern Mediterranean, and a shield decorated with jewels that came from Sri Lanka (southeast of India). We know, therefore, that the wealthy class of a small medieval kingdom in England did not function in isolation. Its cultural products included tangible appropriation from both near and far.

The Sutton Hoo case is not remarkable except that archeologists were surprised about the level of wealth buried there. All except the most isolated societies engage in trade that results in intercultural tangible appropriation. For example, many of the Indigenous peoples of North America used porcupine quills to create elaborate decorative patterns on shoes, clothing, cloth bags, and many other items. Because they are hollow, the quills can be threaded like beads, and they were dyed various colors by using plants to produce natural dyes. However, the arrival of colonial settlers and their westward expansion led to increasing trade between the colonizers and Indigenous Americans. Small glass beads became a staple of intercultural trade. These beads traveled to the American Great Plains from Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. By 1850, imported beads and traditional quill work were increasingly intermingled. (See figure 1.6.) By 1900, beads were so inexpensive and widely available that the use of quills almost vanished from Indigenous handwork, only to be revived later in a conscious return to traditional culture.

Next, consider two specific objects that are in the collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art ("The MET"). One is from 13th-century France, and the other is from what is now the center of the continental United States. (See figure 1.7 and figure 1.8.) Here, the tangible appropriation is the transfer of ownership that brought each of them their shared home in New York City.

Coming across these two objects in different areas of the same museum, it might not be obvious that this silver hand and fringed shirt have something important in common. They are both sacred objects within the home cultures that produced them. They both have religious as well as artistic importance. The Medieval French silver hand is not simply a sculpture. It is a reliquary, which is a container created to hold relics (in this case, physical remains) of a Roman Catholic saint. It would have been placed on a church altar during religious services. The leather shirt is a war shirt of the Crow Nation, an Indigenous people whose traditional homeland is spread across present-day Montana and Wyoming. It was made to be worn during special ceremonies. Human hair from tribal members contributes to the shirt's fringe, signifying that the power of the warrior who wears it will be used to protect the tribe. (The existing threat to the tribe when it was created was the United States army.)

We do not know precisely how either object found its way to New York. In each case, it was eventually donated to The MET by a wealthy art collector. In each case, this transfer is art appropriation, where a religious artifact has been acquired for display as art. In the case of the French reliquary, we might allow that the United States has an artistic culture that is deeply indebted to French culture, and so its transportation from France to New York might be nothing more than a case of art appropriation. However, that is not plausible in the case of the war shirt. Traditional Crow culture is clearly distinct from the European-collecting culture that developed the art museum as a place to display collections of art. They are distinct societies and this appropriation is tangible cultural appropriation. According to Crow custom, no one in the community had the authority to transfer the shirt out of tribal control. It could only have become the property of an art collector and then the museum through some initial act of theft. (Imagine a private individual claiming to own the Statue of Liberty and offering it for sale! No legitimate transfer of property could happen that way.) According to Crow tradition and living representatives of the tribe, the shirt should not be displayed and should be returned to the Crow Nation.

In many cases, cultural appropriation from traditional and Indigenous peoples involves trafficking in stolen goods. In the United States, museums and institutions supported by federal funding are now required to locate and return any Indigenous human remains and sacred objects in their possession. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 was originally designed to address museum collections containing human remains and artifacts stolen by looters and grave robbers. However, the law has a broad description of which tangible objects should be returned. The law requires the return of any "object having ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance central to the Native American group or culture itself." The Association on American Indian Affairs has asked The MET to return the war shirt to the Crow Nation. However, because the war shirt was a "private gift" to The MET, the museum is not legally obligated to return it, and they have not done so. The museum's ongoing possession and display of the shirt are directly contrary to the cultural beliefs and values of the people who created it. In this manner, cultural appropriation often leads to ongoing disrespect for the integrity of Indigenous peoples.

Art history offers countless examples of cultural appropriation through copying rather than physical transfer. A famous example is a print created by Albrecht Dürer in 1504, portraying Adam and Eve. (See figure 1.9.) A life-long Roman Catholic who was sympathetic to the Protestant Reformation, Dürer produced many famous images of Christian subject matter. At the same time, he was working at the height of the artistic and cultural movement that we know as the Renaissance, during which European artists looked back to earlier non-Christian achievements for inspiration and guidance. In this print, Dürer appropriated the poses of two ancient statues. Eve is modeled on a Venus statue from pagan Greece, and Adam is modeled on an Apollo statue from pagan Rome. One is a goddess, the other a god. (See figure 1.10.) Here we have a straightforward case of non-tangible appropriation that is also cultural appropriation.

Comparing Dürer's print with the two statues, notice the basic stance of the figures. In each case, the weight of the body is one one leg (foot firmly planted). The other leg is bent at the knee and the heel of the foot is off the ground. This pose, used in many ancient statues, is called contrapposto or "counterpoise." It produces a slight curve of the whole body, making the figures more dynamic and alive. In this case, it creates the effect of Adam and Eve leaning in toward one another in an intimate way. But Dürer has not simply appropriated the ancient technique of contrapposto . Look at Adam's uneven shoulders, the turn of their two heads, and Adam's hair. Adam and Eve are clearly modeled on, and so appropriated from, these two specific statues.

There was no significant connection between ancient Mediterranean culture and the culture of Bavaria, where Dürer was born and raised. The area had once been part of the Roman Empire, but Germanic culture had always remained distinct from that of the Roman conquerors. Furthermore, it had been more than a thousand years since the empire had collapsed. Today, many people assume that there was ongoing cultural continuity between ancient Greece and Rome and later European culture. However, the connection back to those ancient Mediterranean cultures is largely a product of events of Dürer's own time. Artists and intellectuals revived the connection through appropriation. Several generations of Renaissance intellectuals and artists made a conscious effort to infuse ancient pagan culture into their own Christian societies. These appropriations from the past transformed European culture. (This is why they referred to their active appropriation of the past as a "Renaissance" or "rebirth." They understood that Greek culture and Roman culture were dead cultures and they wanted to make them "live" again.) Furthermore, Dürer was not copying what was happening in other visual art in Bavaria at the time. Art historians have established that he was a trendsetter in being the first artist in southern Germany to embrace and promote Renaissance humanism in visual art (Price 2003). He was leading the way among his immediate Bavarian peers in selecting Apollo as a model for male figures in Christian art.

Therefore, Dürer's Adam and Eve is not simply art appropriation. It is a case of cultural appropriation. A new artwork was created by appropriating from the art of other cultures.

Another example of cultural appropriation is Vincent van Gogh's rendering of a print by Hiroshige. (See figure 1.11.) Hiroshige established his reputation in Japan by creating the Tokaido series that Kunisada appropriated. At the end of his life, Hiroshige's final achievement was a larger set of prints called One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856-59). Edo was the traditional name for present-day Tokyo. Unfortunately, Hiroshige died during a cholera epidemic in 1858, leaving the series unfinished. Just a few years earlier, the United States sent warships and used threats to get Japan to enter into an open trade agreement. Negotiations were completed in 1860, and Japanese prints by Hiroshige, Kunisada, and other artists flowed out of Japan in staggering numbers. Many were exported to Europe, where van Gogh (despite his poverty) owned more than 650 of them (Rüger and Vellekoop 2018). Copies of some of them appear on the walls and backgrounds of indoor settings in van Gogh's later paintings. In in at least two cases, he made detailed copies of prints by Hiroshige. One of these was Plum Estate, Kameido, the 30th print in the one hundred views of Edo series. Like several other designs in this print series, Plum Estate displays a high level of originality. Hiroshige fills the image with a close-up of one uniquely bent plum tree while reducing everything else to the background. The time depicted is early spring: the plum trees are flowering. Crowds have come to view them from the fenced path that cuts through the orchard. Van Gogh carefully copies Hiroshige's composition. However, he changes the colors, darkening the foregrounded tree and the red sky. Hiroshige's pleasant sunset becomes something much more dramatic.

So, van Gogh carried out cultural appropriation in two distinct ways: he bought imported Japanese prints (tangible appropriation), and then he copied all or parts of some of them.

Van Gogh did not hide his artistic debt to Hiroshige. By copying the Japanese system of text in boxes within the print, van Gogh makes it clear that he is appropriating from another culture. (In the original, the title and series title are the two boxes in the upper right, and the artist's name is at the left. However, van Gogh did not attempt to make an accurate copy of the original Japanese characters.) In letters to his brother, van Gogh praised the directness of the Japanese approach and said that all his later work was modeled on the design principles and "feeling" of Japanese art (van Gogh, letter of 10 September 1889). So van Gogh's appropriation was both very specific, copying content, and more general, adapting design principles and artistic style.

Many other European artists of the time also studied Japanese prints and appropriated their designs. This was especially true in France. Henri de Tolouse-Lautrec, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and many other artists in the late 19th century appropriated subject matter and designs from Japanese prints. However, some of these artists were less open about their reliance on cultural appropriation. Until recently, art history textbooks often praised them for their originality without explaining that some of their most striking designs were appropriated. For example, Mary Cassatt made a set of ten prints that were inspired by her study of Japanese prints. The Bath, in particular, recreates a mother-child scene that appears in many Japanese prints. (See figure 1.12.) She also adopts design principles that originated in Japanese portrait prints: the basic picture is a black line drawing, the figures occupy most of the image, only a few colors are used, and there is little else shown beyond the primary subject. Cassatt has engaged in a double appropriation in The Bath: there is style appropriation (how it's drawn), and there is content appropriation (what is pictured). This distinction between content and style is explained in greater detail below, in the section 1.6.

The previous section introduced the idea of cultural appropriation without explaining what is meant by culture. The first thing to note is that the word "culture" is being used in an inclusive and nonjudgmental way. Every person lives in an ongoing relationship to one or more cultures. Other than young infants, no one is uncultured. Among adults, no one is really "more" cultured than anyone else.

Unfortunately, the term "culture" is frequently used in a judgmental way. It is used to endorse the values and modes of expression of a society's privileged class. This elitist, exclusionary approach is associated with Matthew Arnold's book Anarchy and Culture (1875). Famously, Arnold limits culture to "the best which has been thought and said" (Arnold 1875, p. x). He also describes it as "the sweetness and light of the few" that aims at the improvement and perfection of the masses (Arnold 1875, p. 43). For Arnold, nothing negative belongs to culture. On this approach, privileged groups have historically, and even now, denied that non-dominant groups possess their own culture. In the past, denials of cultural legitimacy were often expressed by the term "uncivilized." An elitist approach to culture is often used to justify oppression in the name of "helping" groups identified as uncultured and uncivilized. Some examples of this sort of cultural elitism are introduced in the next section.

The Japanese prints discussed earlier demonstrate why it is a mistake to think of culture in an elitist way that limits culture to a society's upper classes. When they were new, the prints that impressed and inspired van Gogh and Cassatt were not the "sweetness and light" of Japanese society. In fact, Edo-era Japanese society did not even classify them as art. A painting on silk could be art, but not a cheap, mass-produced Hiroshige print that was available in book shops and from street vendors. A painting that illustrated a classic poem was art, but not an illustration of peasants trudging through the snow, like Hiroshige's Kanbara. Consider Japan's most famous image, Katsushika Hokusai's print The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831). In Japanese society, art did not portray the lives of low-class commoners like those in The Great Wave, which shows men in boats fighting the waves after hauling their tuna to the market in Edo. In their original time and place, mass-produced prints were part of the entertainment industry of Edo and other large cities. The Japanese viewed these prints as low-status craft objects (Davis 2021, p. 16). They reflected the lives and values of the merchant class, a group that Japanese society placed as the lowest in its ranking of social classes. Although Japanese society did not regard the prints as among their "collective best" achievements, these prints were (rightly!) treated by European and, subsequently, American artists and collectors as central documents of Japanese culture. In hindsight, Japanese society came to agree.

A non-elitist view of culture calls for non-elitist approach to art. In the non-elitist approach to culture used in this book, art includes a society's treasured fine art, but it also includes popular and disposable art. It includes both Shakespeare's plays and children's bedtime stories, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Marvel comic books, the symphonic music of Beethoven and the songs of Taylor Swift, the Statue of Liberty and paper dolls. (See figure 1.13.)

In the past, paper dolls were printed in American newspapers. In many ways, these printed sheets had an original cultural status like that of the prints of Hiroshige, Kunisada, and Hokusai. Like those Japanese prints, the paper dolls were mass-produced for a broader range of people than the paintings and sculptures created for wealthier, socially privileged people. For that reason, people did not regard them as art when they were new. Nonetheless, folk art, popular art, and mass-produced art are a valuable record of the beliefs and values that are widespread in a society. They are part of culture, too. For example, these paper dolls from 1895 are very much a reflection of the dominant culture in the United States. They feature historical figures from England and Scotland, including two who played a role in the English colonization of North America. As such, these particular dolls played a role in carrying the history and traditions of the dominant culture to the children of the emerging middle class of the late 19th century.

So, what is culture?

Art and culture are closely related, but they are not the same thing. Basically, "culture" refers to a distinctive group of people rather than the things they produce.

One culture is distinguished from another by reference to the basic values, behaviors, and beliefs that organize their way of life and provide them with an ongoing, inter-generational group identity. From this vantage point, art is one part of cultural identity. Art is expressive communication that reflects group identity. Communication that conveys information without a significant expressive purpose isn't art. So, a scientific report or a Wikipedia article isn't art. In contrast, later chapters of this book treat advertisements, newspaper editorials, and cartoons as art. They are popular art.

This emphasis on expression of group identity differs from what many people assume about art, which is that the arts are important as the expression of individual creativity and self-expression. There are countless books that approach art as individual self-expression. However, that is not the approach taken here. Instead, the emphasis is on how self-identity and self-expression are closely related to group identity. To borrow from an essay by Ralph Ellison, a Black American writer, "Art by its nature is social" (Ellison 1953, p. 38).

Why should we regard art as inherently social? To appropriate a famous metaphor crafted by the poet John Donne in 1623, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Even if it is the case that some art is a display of self-expression, and some artists are more creative than others, no artist produces art in a cultural vacuum. Donne did not invent the language he used to craft this metaphor: his starting point was the English language and its conventions and vocabulary as those existed in the early 17th century.

Donne may have originated the "no man is an island" metaphor, but he is hardly the first person to observe that how people behave and what they believe is influenced by when and where they were born and raised. As Aristotle observed twenty-four centuries ago, humans are social animals. We depend on each other. Human babies have lengthy periods of development in which they learn language and become socialized by those around them. Even for adults, survival is almost impossible without group or social cooperation. Social cooperation puts food on the table, keeps the lights on, and provides for the needs of children and others who can't fully care for themselves. At the same time, societies have a historical dimension. In raising the next generation, each society passes along values, beliefs, and customs. Some of these social inheritances will be relatively recent in origin. Some persist for many generations. Either way, no group starts from scratch and invents all of its own language, tools, religion, entertainment, and laws. Some of these things are passed along in an organized way, in formal education. Some are learned informally from others in the society by the process of living among, and imitating, the rest of the group.

Culture, then, is group identity based on historical identity. Culture binds a group of people together because their distinctive way of life is shared by, and carried forward from, the previous generation. By definition, culture is shared, learned, and cumulative. None of this means that it remains fixed or frozen. Later generations adapt and modify cultural traditions transmitted in response to changing times and circumstances.

This emphasis on what is learned from the previous generation distinguishes cultural membership from other kinds of group membership. In the modern world, cultural identity frequently relates to national identity, as when we say that Korean culture is different from German culture. However, cultures can cut across national and linguistic boundaries, so that we can speak of the culture of Christianity as distinct from the culture of Buddhism. And since there are both Buddhists and Christians in both Germany and Korea, it is also the case that cultures overlap in interesting and complex ways.

To offer a summary definition, the concept of culture used in this book is captured by James Neuliep's description of culture as "an accumulated pattern of values, beliefs, and behaviors, shared by an identifiable group of people with a common history and verbal and nonverbal symbol systems" (Neuliep 2012, p. 19). Notice that, aside from common history, the definition is completely neutral about how a group of people might come together and share an identifiable culture. Notice, in particular, that the definition does not assume that the group is a nation or racial group. Culture is not restricted to national cultures and ethnic cultures. Furthermore, this approach is value-neutral. There is no assumption that any culture is better than any other.

Finally, culture is not mutually exclusive. This is especially true at the level of the individual person. The fact that a person has an identity aligned with one distinctive culture does not rule out alignment with another. In multicultural societies, many individuals belong to an ethnic culture as well as one or more regional cultures or subcultures. For example, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Maya Angelou (1951-2014) are two of America's most famous poets. Setting aside the fact that they lived in different centuries, they are two important representatives of American culture and one can find examples of their writing in any good collection of American literature. However, Dickinson is a White woman from New England, while Angelou is a Black woman who was primarily raised in Arkansas. As American women, they have a degree of shared cultural identity. At the same time, it is clear to anyone who understands American society that these two poets have, and express, different cultural identities. Dickinson belonged to the dominant culture of her time and place. Angelou did not.

To summarize, art is a major element of culture. Every society encodes its culture in its storytelling and its visual and performing arts, and these cultural products provide access to shared practices, beliefs, and behaviors. By examining the full range of art produced by a society, it is possible to get a rich picture of its ongoing way of life. Furthermore, the arts frequently display a culture's interactions with other cultures. Sometimes this is explicit, where the subject matter is the meeting of different cultures. Sometimes it is less explicit but shows itself in appropriations from another culture. Either way, the arts provide a wealth of evidence about both inter-cultural and intra-cultural social relationships. Patterns of appropriation are especially revealing about cultural attitudes and behaviors that involve group dynamics. Where group dynamics involve oppression and discrimination, works of art and literature and other cultural products will sometimes include a record of the endorsement of those harmful values. Unfortunately, culture is not all sweetness and light.

So far, this chapter has distinguished between tangible and non-tangible appropriation. It has also explained why some appropriation is cultural appropriation. However, to understand the full extent of cultural appropriation, it helps to see that it involves five distinct categories of intercultural appropriation. Setting aside the first type, tangible appropriation, there are four distinct kinds of non-tangible cultural appropriation.

1. Content appropriation is taking and reusing preexisting ideas or information or stories.

2. Style appropriation is copying a distinctive artistic style from earlier cultural products.

3. Motif appropriation is copying one or more design features, patterns, or symbols from earlier cultural products.

(To give credit, the basic formulations of these first three categories are from the work of James O. Young (2011).)

When the appropriation is by a cultural insider, these three are artistic appropriation. When the appropriation is by a cultural outsider, they are cultural appropriation.

There is a fourth type of non-tangible appropriation, and it is so frequently linked to cultural appropriation that this initial discussion will treat it as such:

4. Voice appropriation is representing people of another culture in a way that implies insight into distinctive or important aspects of that culture.

To illustrate what is involved in each of the four types of non-tangible cultural appropriation, here are four new examples.

CONTENT: Content is any information represented, described, displayed, or shown in a picture, text, story, or other communication. Thus, content appropriation is extremely common. It occurs whenever one person shares information they have taken from another source. However, the focus here is content appropriation within the arts. The popular "Twilight" books by Stephanie Myers say that a number of central characters are shapeshifters belonging to the Indigenous Quileute people of western Washington state. Myers appropriated the traditional origin story of the Quileute Nation and inserted werewolves (or shapeshifting wolves) into the story, weaving her new material into appropriated legends to create a fictional background story for the "Twilight" saga. As a result of Myers's changes to the appropriated content, an internet search for word "Quileute" leads almost immediately to the topic of whether the tribe includes real werewolves. For good or bad, the "Twilight" series is built around appropriated content.

STYLE: If content is what is presented, then style is how it is presented, its "mode of expression" (Judkins 2011, p. 134). There are broad, shared styles, such as Impressionism in painting, ragtime in music, and Elizabethan drama in theater. Style can also be highly individualized, so that people who are familiar with van Gogh's work can tell immediately that a painting displays his distinctive style. Style is especially prominent in music: "only a moment's exposure (a few seconds of listening) is usually enough for us to identify it" (Judkins 2011, p. 134). In the 1960s, popular music underwent profound changes. Many of the changes arose from the so-called "British Invasion" in which British musicians took over the airwaves, juke boxes, and sales charts of the American music industry and then much of the rest of the world. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are the most famous bands in the British Invasion. Both bands practiced content appropriation, "covering" American popular songs and exporting their versions back to the United States. For example, both bands covered Barrett Strong's 1959 hit record "Money (That's What I Want)." However, in addition to this content appropriation, both bands learned to perform several different American musical styles and then appropriated these styles for their own original music. For example, the Beatles adopt the sound of close harmony doo wop for "This Boy." "Back in the U.S.S.R." blatantly copies the style of the Beach Boys. "Don't Pass Me By" is clearly indebted to country music. Similarly, the Rolling Stones were initially known for their ability to copy Black American styles, especially blues music. Clear examples of original songs that sound like American blues are "I Got the Blues," "Stray Cat Blues," and "All Down the Line."

MOTIF: A motif is a distinctive pattern, design element, or symbol. The state flag of New Mexico has a very simple design. (See figure 1.14.) It has a distinctive, burgundy-red figure on a golden yellow background. Some people might see it as a cross centered on a circle, with the cross consisting of four parallel lines. In fact, the basic design is a traditional sun symbol of an Indigenous group, the Zia Pueblo. The lines are sunrays radiating out, so they are not really a cross. This symbol is sacred to this Indigenous community. It became known to cultural outsiders because it appeared on a sacred pot that was physically removed from the pueblo in the late 19th century and then the pot was displayed in nearby Santa Fe. Some years later, individuals within the dominant White culture appropriated the design and entered it into a contest for the design of the state's flag. As often happens, minor changes were made during the appropriation process. Today, this modified Zia sun decorates jewelry, clothing, tourism advertising, tattoos, and even disposable face masks. Many Indigenous people of New Mexico find this motif appropriation to be highly offensive and the tribe has been fighting (unsuccessfully) for legal control over their Zia sun symbol.

VOICE: Last but not least, voice appropriation occurs when an outsider represents the cultural perspective of another culture. As an example, consider a postage stamp issued by the United States in 1930. (See figure 1.15.) Many postage stamps are issued to commemorate anniversaries of important events, and these stamps often appropriate images from the time of that event. The 1930 stamp was issued to commemorate the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the arrival of the Puritan "pilgrims." The stamp commemorates the beginning of British colonization of present-day New England.

The picture in the center of this stamp is a copy of the official seal of the government of the colony. (To this extent, we have content appropriation.) The seal was designed in 1629, before the colonizers left England on the Mayflower. It pictures an adult male who fits an English stereotype of the Indigenous peoples they expected to encounter. The man is almost naked. He holds his arms wide so that his weapon is non-threatening, an idea reinforced by having the arrow in his other hand turned down to the ground. A ribbon of speech is above and around his head. Although it is hard to read when reduced to a stamp, the ribbon contains the same words as the original seal: "Come over and help us." Obviously, "come over" is an invitation to cross the Atlantic Ocean from England. The "help" that is requested is less clear. However, the Puritans saw themselves as divinely charged to spread their version of Christianity into North America, so the message suggests that the man is asking the English to bring Christianity to his people.

The government seal of the colony literally puts words into the mouth of the man in the picture. This an extremely clear example of voice appropriation. Outsiders have created a symbol in which a man welcomes them by asking them to bring "help." He is being presented as a representative of whatever people the Puritans would displace when they founded their colony. (It would turn out to be the Wampanoag Tribe of present-day Massachusetts, the "People of the First Light.") The image implies that Indigenous people saw themselves as culturally deficient and in need of reform and change that could only be brought about by the arrival of the European colonizers. The image purports to tell us what the Wampanoag people thought about their own situation at this time. In this English fantasy, Indigenous people welcomed English colonization and cultural change.

Many scholars have observed that voice appropriation is most often a kind of voice replacement. As historian Caroline Dodds Pennock puts it, it is the distorting practice of "filtering" another culture through "ventriloquism" (Pennock 2023, p. 214). In this case, an imaginary man speaks for an entire people. A "voice" created by outsiders replaces genuine representatives of the culture so that actual participants of the culture are silenced or ignored.

Reproducing the colony seal on the stamp compounds the original voice appropriation. The postal service could have used some other image. In selecting and republishing this seal, a U.S. government agency revived a long-forgotten voice appropriation. The stamp spread the fantasy that Indigenous peoples of North America had welcomed colonization.

Voice appropriation is common in literature. Consider the example of The Vanishing American, a novel by one of the United States' most popular authors, Zane Grey. More than 100 films have been based on his books. Born and raised near Columbus, Ohio, Grey was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and he was a dentist before eventually pursuing a career in fiction writing. Grey is best known for his many books on a topic that was far from his Ohio upbringing: the American West.

As was common at the time, The Vanishing American was published in installments in a popular magazine that reached millions of readers before it was issued in book form. Grey aims to offer a sympathetic account of the mistreatment of the Navajo Nation (their Diné Bikéyah). He does this by focusing on the personal struggles of the fictional character of Nophaie, who has returned to his tribal homeland after a "White" education and success in college football. In 1922, most readers would have readily identified Nophaie with Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox tribes who had just retired from professional baseball. Readers who understood that Thorpe was Grey's model would transfer Nophaie's views to Thorpe, lending them credibility by association with a sports celebrity.

The following passage is one of many where the fictional Nophaie offers his thoughts:

A few lines later, Grey describes Nophaie's words as an expression of "the misery of his race."

Here, Grey goes beyond an association of Nophaie with Thorpe. Although Grey is an outsider to the culture he represents, he uses Nophaie to speak on behalf of "the Indian," as though racial identity ensures that Nophaie is the voice of many Indigenous peoples. So, Grey is not simply telling a story here. He wants the story to represent real people and real events, and he purports to represent a whole culture by giving voice to one individual. As discussed later in this book, in Chapter 5, Grey is giving new expression to a long-standing idea of the dominant culture, the idea that Indigenous peoples are a vanishing race and cannot coexist with a more advanced dominant culture. Like the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal discussed above, Grey takes a doctrine of the dominant culture and inserts it into the speech of a representative of Indigenous peoples.

A more famous and possibly more consequential example of literary voice appropriation is Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851). Published ten years before the United States entered its horrific civil war, the novel's primary importance is that it portrayed Southern life and customs. It concentrated on the institution of slavery in Kentucky and Louisiana. A number of the key plot ideas in the book are content appropriation from stories she heard while living in Cincinnati, and some characters and situations are derived from the voice appropriation of the popular minstrel shows of the time. (See Chapter 4, Section 4.7.) Because Stowe wrote about the South but never lived there, many things presented in the story can be classified as voice appropriation. For example, here is a passage from Chapter 30 ("The Slave Warehouse"). It includes speculation about the motivations of specific behaviors.

Although the book is a work of fiction, Stowe, like Grey, represents a real place and its culture, and does so with a political purpose. The second quoted paragraph includes voice appropriation. However, it is not as explicit or obvious as Grey's presentation of Nophaie as a racial spokesperson. Although no speech or dialogue occurs here, Stowe goes beyond descriptions of what can be seen and heard. She says that the enslaved men were encouraged to make music. Some danced. Others did not. This sets up her presentation of the thinking and intentions of both the Southern slavers and the enslaved men. Because "some incline to pine" for home and family, the slavers encouraged them to engage in practices that might redirect their thoughts and attitudes. By implication, those who make "merry" with the music are not pining, or at least not as much, implying that some of the enslaved men accept their abusive treatment and status as property. While it is done in a less obvious way than Grey's "The Vanishing Race," Stowe practices voice appropriation. (For another example, see Chapter 4, Section 4.8).

Voice appropriation should never be accepted at face value. Stowe is writing about the interactions of two groups with distinct cultures, but she is an "outsider" to both of them. Her understanding of African-derived culture, especially music, was likely based on the craze for minstrel performances and "Ethiopian" songs (Meer 2005, pp. 9-11). But that form of music and dance was a grotesque White parody of Black culture.

Consider an alternative reading of the "noisy mirth" Stowe interprets for us. Music and dance are central to the spiritual life of the African societies brutalized by the transatlantic slave trade. In the United States, many Black communities retained their ancestral rituals of religious dancing. Therefore, the music and dancing described by Stowe might be a continuation of those practices and not, as she implies, mere entertainment. To an outsider, it looks like making "merry" (having fun). However, what Stowe describes might instead be a form of defiance through cultural affirmation. (See figure 1.17.) It might be prayer for deliverance rather than frivolous diversion. In other words, Stowe's interpretation might be a serious misrepresentation based on her own Puritan-derived perspective on music and dance, which she projects into another culture. We know from many 19th-century written records that White outsiders routinely saw African-based communal religious dance as mere entertainment. In fact, Uncle Tom's Cabin directly mentions Timothy Flint 's travel book Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Stowe, chapter 15). Flint's book claimed that the communal religious music and dancing in Place Congo, New Orleans, was "license and revelry" demonstrating "forgetfulness of the past" (Flint 1826, p. 140). Basically, Flint witnessed a religious practice and thought he was looking at a party. He witnessed a preservation of ancestral memory and saw "forgetfulness." Given that Stowe goes out of her way to call attention to Flint's book, it is likely that she was relying on that source and repeating the same mistake.

The examples of the last two sections have been presented as illustrating distinct types of cultural appropriation. However, the four types of non-tangible appropriation are frequently combined in practice. Look again at the example of van Gogh's copy of a Hiroshige print (figure 1.11. ). The painting gives us three types of non-tangible cultural appropriation, and perhaps it gives us all four.

Content appropriation: van Gogh directly copies Hiroshige's content, a flowering plum tree in a public garden.

Style appropriation: By copying Hiroshige's print, van Gogh appropriates aspects of Hiroshige's personal style. Some aspects of this style were highly innovative, especially his fondness for placing one object so close to the viewer that it fills most of the picture. In many of Hiroshige's later prints, the featured object is pictured as being so close to the viewer that parts of it fall outside the picture frame. Other elements of the scene are then placed at a distance and therefore appear very small.

Motif appropriation: By directly copying the print, van Gogh picks up the Japanese design principle of placing multiple text boxes within the picture frame. This feature is specific to woodblock prints of this era. It is not a design feature of other Japanese visual art. These boxes were often given a customized design that was unique to just that one print series. Ironically, van Gogh's version eliminates a distinctive Hiroshige motif. The original displays Hiroshige's "signature" design of indentations at the four corners of the print's border.

Voice appropriation: van Gogh may have selected this image because there is a spiritual dimension in the cultural tradition of viewing plum blossoms in the early spring. At this point in his life, van Gogh was beginning to identify himself as a Buddhist. He was probably aware that this image reflects an East Asian, Buddhist perspective on nature that was uncommon in Europe in the late 19th century. Therefore, van Gogh may have appropriated this content because it celebrates the tradition of blossom-viewing, which expresses a particular spiritual and philosophical relationship to nature and seasonal change. In this way, the image "voices" or expresses an East Asian or specifically Buddhist philosophy of nature that was only gradually becoming understood in Europe and European-derived societies.

As this example illustrates, content and voice appropriation are often intertwined. A contemporary example is the combination of voice and content appropriation that doomed La Chingona Cannabis.

Contemporary Voice and Content Appropriation: La Chingona Cannabis

La Chingona Cannabis was a growing business in California until their voice appropriation was discovered. Launched in 2020, the name is slang for "Bad Ass Woman" and the company advertised itself as owned and operated by the three Del Rosario sisters from Guadalajara, Mexico. Advertising and packaging featured women dressed to celebrate the Mexican holiday Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead). (See figure 1.18.)

However, the Del Rosario sisters were a fiction created for marketing purposes. Hispanic women in Los Angeles were angered to learn that the company was actually founded by an American man with one Mexican grandparent, who appropriated stories about three sisters in Guadalajara from his rommmate at Harvard Business School. The other co-owners of the company were non-Hispanic men. This discovery quickly resulted in a social media campaign against the company's voice appropriation, and the resulting boycott led to removal of the La Chingona brand from the cannabis market. In the face of the negative backlash, the brand existed for less than a year (Pineda 2020).

For another example of complex, overlapping appropriations, consider Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème, which premiered in 1896. It adapted parts of Henri Murger's 1851 novel, Scènes de la vie de bohème. Puccini, an Italian composer, appropriated a story set in Paris, France, and so the opera ends up portraying Parisian social life as it was some sixty years before the opera was written. Famously, the book and opera portray the distinctive "Bohemian" lifestyle, social interactions, and values of an artistic subculture that emerged in Paris in the early 19th century. As a result, voice appropriation follows from the high degree of content appropriation. Furthermore, since Puccini was not part of this subculture, this voice appropriation is a case of cultural appropriation.

However, some might object that La Bohème is not cultural appropriation, because one European artist is appropriating from another European artist in the same century. They share the same culture, so Puccini is not an outsider in relation to the material he adapted. Although it is true that 19th-century France and Italy have some shared cultural history, it does not follow that Puccini was a cultural insider with respect to this material. Treating him as an insider rather than an outsider reflects an extremely crude understanding of cultural unity. Recall the earlier example of two American poets, Emily Dickinson and Maya Angelou. Shared culture is often combined with cultural diversity. National differences are a major example. By any measure, Italy and France have very distinct cultures. Even there, national boundaries are only a crude approximation of major cultural differences. Most countries contain ethnic and religious diversity, leading to cultural distinctions between people who might live next door to one another. In fact, that point is central to the story of La Bohème, especially in Act II, in which different social classes mingle and the poor Bohemians scam Alcindoro, a wealthy aristocrat. So, La Bohème counts as cultural appropriation even if the source and the opera emerge from a "shared" broader culture. (See Chapter 2 for an explanation of how ethnicity relates to culture.)

Voice appropriation is undeniable in several of Puccini's other operas, especially Madama Butterfly (1904). (See figure 1.19.) It has been and remains one of the most-performed operas in the world. Once again, voice appropriation is embedded in content appropriation. In this case, Puccini appropriates his basic content from a short story by American author John Luther Long, who seems to have appropriated the basic plot from the English translation of a recent French novel, Japan: Madame Chrysanthème (1887). The opera also has a second stream of content appropriation. It features identifiable Japanese and Chinese melodies, which are woven into Puccini's own original music. As he did with La Bohème, Puccini keeps the original setting and time period. Pinkerton, an officer of the U.S. Navy, is stationed in Japan. He betrays and ruins Cio-Cio-San, the Japanese woman he uses as his "plaything" and then abandons. Later, he returns to Japan with his new American wife, Kate, and demands that Cio-Cio-san give up their child. He plans to return to the United States with the child, but not her. In a highly emotional final scene, Cio-Cio-San commits suicide.

Music by Giacomo Puccini
Closing scene of the opera:

John Luther Long

"No," she said, very softly.

To die with Honor

"Oh, pitiful Kwannon! Nothing?"

"Oh, pitiful Kwannon!" she prayed.

Cio-Cio-San is a victim of racism in all versions of the story, which makes her a sympathetic character. At the same time, it presents "Asian women as submissive and exotic sex objects" (Hu 2019). In addition, there seems no good way to understand Cio-Cio-San's surrender of her son and suicide at the end of Puccini's Madama Butterfly other than to see her as the symbolic embodiment of an "Oriental" willingness to submit to "the West." Some people defend the story and the opera on the grounds that its exposure of American racism gives it an "anticolonial perspective" (Groos 2023, p. xvii). By creating empathy for Cio-Cio-San, it is critical of exploitive "temporary marriages" of young women in Japanese port cities that were open to foreigners. That seems correct. However, it is also the case that Puccini's version presents her as accepting her exploitation and tragic fate. This is a significant change from Long's original story, in which Cho-Cho-San ultimately defies her American "husband" and gets the upper hand. However, Puccini appropriated his content from an alternative version, a stage play that ends with her suicide. (As content appropriation, the opera is therefore an appropriation from an appropriation of an appropriation!) Because Puccini used the version with Cio-Cio-San's suicide instead of Long's version and her defiant escape with the child, it is difficult to avoid concluding that this famous opera is a racist fantasy. It endorses a stereotype of Asian women as "meek and obedient [and] disposable sexual objects to be owned by men" (Wang 2021).

The message of Madama Butterfly is so offensive to many 21st-century viewers that the New Orleans Opera rewrote it for a 2023 production. In their new production, the opera has Long's original ending.

Many years later, the content of La Bohème and Madama Butterfly reappeared in new forms. The two operas were the primary source material for a pair of popular musicals of the late twentieth century, Rent (1993) and Miss Saigon (1989). Jonathan Larson appropriated the content of La Bohème as Rent. He updated the story and setting to his own social surroundings, New York City in the 1990s, so Rent is an example of content appropriation but not necessarily voice appropriation. In contrast, the content appropriation that transformed Madama Butterfly into Miss Saigon is a case of further voice appropriation. Miss Saigon updates the setting to Viet Nam and Thailand in the 1970s, but once again the focus is a culture clash involving American military personnel in East Asia. The characters get new names, but the "love" story and tragic conclusion are basically the same. Like Madama Butterfly, Miss Saigon repeats and endorses colonial fantasies about a non-Western society, especially with respect to women.

Some people resist the idea that Puccini's Butterfly and the derivative Miss Saigon are racist, pro-colonial fantasy. They are excused on the grounds that they are merely entertainment, or "just a story." Or they are excused on the grounds that they are artworks, and so our response should focus on their universal themes concerning our shared humanity. Such responses are simplistic. They can be entertaining, and art, and pro-colonial fantasies all at the same time. A story or picture or song often means more than it literally says. Stories - especially stories that become popular or ones that are shared over several generations - almost always communicate core values and beliefs of the group that finds them entertaining or interesting. Cultural appropriation adds another layer of complexity to our communications. One layer may have a positive message while another layer conveys negative messages. Sadly, sometimes this allows racist messages to be packaged in the resulting mixture of entertaining content.

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Appropriation, Racism, and Art: Constructing American Identities

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Art Appropriation and Cultural Appropriation Theodore Gracyk Chapter Goals Define appropriation in in a descriptive, non-evaluative way Understand that appropriation is common in the arts Understand major types of artistic appropriation Define culture Understand that cultural identities are complex Define cultural appropriation Put simply, to appropriate is to take something and to claim it as one's own.

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Cultural Appropriation in Visual Arts Practice: When is it NOT appropriate to appropriate?

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Cultural Appropriation in Visual Arts Practice: When is it NOT appropriate to appropriate?

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Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate and/or unacknowledged copying or adoption of the styles, practices or ideas of a cultural group or individual. In Australia, all First Nations Australian artists are protected by Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Protocols (ICIP).

First Nations Australian Peoples and Cultures are incredibly diverse, and understandably so too is the advice to non-First Nations people about best practice in engaging with and responding to such artists and artworks. However, here are some respectful approaches we can all adopt:

1. Know what Country you are on, and who are the people with cultural authority who can advise you

2. Position the voice of the artist as the highest authority when exploring artwork, including interpreting and making meaning in artworks.

3. Be aware that for many First Nations Cultures, knowledge that is communicated in artworks belong not to an individual, but to a community, and that this knowledge is protected by that community.

4. Do not respond to artworks by working in the style of that artist, or by appropriating their direct experiences. Rather, support students to understand the ideas explored in the artwork, and then to connect these ideas to the context of your students, and respond in ways that honour their own experiences. The Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) has a helpful flowchart to assist in this process

As educators, we are learners. If we don’t know what to do, then we find out. When we get it wrong, we learn, we reflect, and we try again.

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Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts

"While works by individual artists are protected by copyright, Australia does not yet have a law that prevents alteration, distortion or misuse of traditional symbols, songs, dances, performances and story that may be part of the heritage of particular Indigenous language groups.

This is where the Australia Council for the Arts' Protocols for using First Nations Intellectual and Cultural Property in the Arts comes in.

The protocols provide a pathway for collaborations and creation of new Indigenous work."
Dr Terri Janke

Background

First published in 2002 and revised in 2007, this protocol guide endorses the rights of First Nations people to their cultural heritage and supports First Nations creative practice.

This protocol guide encourages self-determination and helps build a strong and diverse Indigenous arts sector. These are key goals and priority areas of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Creative practitioners who work with First Nations artists or engage with Indigenous cultural heritage in projects, and are funded by Australia Council grant assessment panels are required to comply with this protocol guide as a condition of funding.

Over the years, the principles and protocols contained in this protocol guide have also been applied nationally and internationally - educating readers and users on Indigenous Australian cultural heritage, and encouraging meaningful collaborations with First Nations artists and creators.

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Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts

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While works by individual artists are protected by copyright, Australia does not yet have a law that prevents alteration, distortion or misuse of traditional symbols, songs, dances, performances and story that may be part of the heritage of particular Indigenous language groups.

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Arts-POP Packages of Practice: Managing Time Integrating the Arts

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Characteristics of Authentic integration

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Integration of arts learning can occur both across arts subjects and across other learning areas. Integration strategies provide opportunities for connecting learning to support teachers to maximise their arts learning time in a crowded curriculum. Arts integration at its most powerful relies heavily on a progressive, Focusing on the needs of the students and empowering them to take autonomy for their own learning. approach to learning that involves students in learning that is actively built, experiential, evolving, collaborative, problem-solving and reflective. Arts integration approaches are not a substitute for teaching the arts as separate subjects. Rather, these approaches complement traditional arts learning and help to affirm the relevance of the arts in the school curriculum.

Why integrate across the arts?

While the national arts curriculum is developed as five distinct arts subjects, there are also opportunities to make connections across arts subjects. The Australian Curriculum: The Arts Foundation to Year 10 Draft for consultation (2012) reinforces this position:

The curriculum enables exploration of the dynamic relationships between Arts subjects evident in works from diverse cultures. This might involve students making works in traditional or contemporary forms or using material from one Arts subject to support learning in another. (p.5)

Source: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)

Why integrate the arts across other learning areas?

Teachers implementing the arts curriculum should recognise that learning in and through the arts has obvious connections with other learning areas. Students' development of understanding, knowledge and skills in the arts helps make learning real and adds a richness and relevance to learning in other areas.

Rather than being self-contained or fixed, disciplines are interconnected, dynamic and growing. A discipline-based curriculum should allow for cross-disciplinary learning that broadens and enriches each student's learning. (The Shape of the Australian Curriculum, v3.0, p.22, Source: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA))

Through integrated learning and exploration of real world topics, issues, experiences or ideas, students are provided with a stimulus both to engage in artistic creation and to develop understanding in another learning area.

The Arts embody some of the most significant and recognisable products and records of all cultures. The Arts can provide a range of pedagogies for use across learning areas in the curriculum.
(Australian Curriculum: The Arts Foundation to Year 10 Draft for consultation, 2012, pp.19-20)

Source: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)

How to integrate the arts across other learning areas?

The Shape of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (2011) outlines opportunities to integrate the arts in other learning areas. There are also additional links to integrated resources in the supporting documents.

What makes successful arts integration?

Successful and sustained arts integration requires all key stakeholders to participate in and support the school community's integration efforts. Supportive administrators who encourage teachers to take risks, learn new skills and alter their teaching methods can maximise time across the curriculum by merging arts concepts with content from other learning areas.

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Integration of arts learning can occur both across arts subjects and across other learning areas. Integration strategies provide opportunities for connecting learning to support teachers to maximise their arts learning time in a crowded curriculum. Arts integration at its most powerful relies

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Artist: Betty Muffler 

Artwork title: Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) 

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Artist: Betty Muffler

Artwork title: Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country)

Medium: acrylic on linen

Size: 152 x 122 cm

Year: 2025

Artist statement:
I am a ngangkaṟi (healer), and it is as a ngangkaṟi that I paint. The eagle is my father’s spirit – it has a special vision that I can use. I’m also a painter of emus, which are a significant part of my birthplace; I paint their tracks belonging to the site, Yalungu. I also paint hands, the hands of a healer, and the eagle that I have inside. If a person’s spirit is absent, then I will send the eagle out to see, as I wait. Then it can be returned, the person is awakened [laughs with joy] – healed!

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betty muffler - ngangkari ngura healing country

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Artist: Brenda Croft 

Artwork title: Weereewa (Lake George) 

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Artist: Brenda Croft

Artwork title: Weereewa (Lake George) Tree I (for Dorothy + Brenda)

Medium: Chromalux print, scanned from original tintype

Size: 105 x 78 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
This work from Croft’s new body of work after/image considers how natural and built environments hold memory/ies. Croft looks deeply into sites that connect directly to her family’s matrilineal history to tell a story of connection and distance, memory and loss over time. Croft’s work looks at her family's early settler-colonial connections to the northeast corner of Weereewa/Lake George, an endorheic lake that rises and falls enigmatically over time. This deeply evocative place has been a site of intra-cultural contact between First Nations Peoples for thousands of years, and colonial impact, fantasies and reflection for almost two centuries.

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brenda croft - diptych a) Weereewa (Lake George) Tree I; b) Weerewa (Lake George), after Lycett

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Artist: Bronte Leighton-Dore 

Artwork title: The treetops rustle; it is carried down the escarpment and dissipates in the lower fields 

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Artist: Bronte Leighton-Dore

Artwork title: The treetops rustle; it is carried down the escarpment and dissipates in the lower fields

Medium: oil on board

Size: 100 x 140 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
The study for this work was painted in residence at Bundanon. While there, I worked with Luke de Zilva, exploring the interplay of sound and image in response to the landscape. For this piece, I returned to a location we had encountered together after following a path carved through the scrub by wallabies. I was drawn to the way the trees, grasses and rocks overlapped, and to a subtle, haunting darkness that seemed to linger in the landscape.

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bronte leighton-dore - the treetops rustle

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Artist: Bugai Whyoulter 

Artwork title: Parnngurr 

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Artist: Bugai Whyoulter

Artwork title: Parnngurr

Medium: acrylic on linen

Size: 152 x 152 cm

Year: 2024

Artist statement:
"We were climbing Parnngurr hill; we were frightened. Kartiya (Europeans) would walk around, trying to catch Martu people. We would run up the hill and hide. We watched them catch people. We were eating flour that white people gave us. It was horrible. From [Parnngurr rockhole], we got in the truck and went with the white people to Jigalong. Kumpaya [Girgirba], Jakayu [Biljabu] and Ngamaru [Bidu], we were all on top of the hill looking at the white people." - Bugai Whyoulter

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Artist: George Kennedy 

Artwork title: Before the Rain 

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Artist: George Kennedy

Artwork title: Before the Rain

Medium: oil on canvas

Size: 122 x 92 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
Pepper is old and I am young. She and I go walking together. Lingering by the sheoaks and gums, she watches the pademelons. Waiting for her, I hum to myself and notice the scent of petrichor rising from the soil. The precursor to rain is one of my favourite smells. We turn our faces into the breeze and inhale the salty ocean air. I have a lot to learn from her.

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Artist: Grace Gladdish 

Artwork title: Entanglement 

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Artist: Grace Gladdish

Artwork title: Entanglement

Medium: watercolour and collaged linoprints on paper

Size: 73 x 152 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
Exploring the landscape in my work is a way of searching for my place, attempting to give shape to the struggle of my existence. When I was a native flower farmer, I grew native plants in manmade environments. Now, I’m fascinated by native species in their natural habitats, particularly alpine regions. Needing no cultivation, these plants flourish without assistance, wearing their struggle in their form. In Entanglement I explore the way these alpine plants grow together, both competing and coexisting, crowded in seeming chaos yet creating patterns. Their relationships with each other and their surroundings are complex and compelling.

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Artist: Harrison Bowe 

Artwork title: A Humbling Insignificance 

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Artist: Harrison Bowe

Artwork title: A Humbling Insignificance

Medium: oil and beeswax on linen

Size: 155 x 99 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
Upon rocks forged when life was in its most primitive form, I observe dawn from shadows which retain the night’s chill. In the presence of such ancient formations, I am met with a humbling insignificance; personal tribulations recede against the vastness of deep time. A Humbling Insignificance explores a unity between the landscape’s physical form and my perception of place, shaped through embodied engagement; traversing terrain, enduring conditions, and reflecting on geological and anthropic histories. Expressive yet composed marks render the landscape’s rugged poetics, while an interplay of mediums distinguishes solid and atmospheric forms, allowing each its own resonance.

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harrison bowe - a humbling insignificance

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Artist: Imants Tillers 

Artwork title: PIKILYI 

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Artist: Imants Tillers

Artwork title: PIKILYI

Medium: synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 16 canvas board panels

Size: 102 x 142 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
This painting celebrates the late Walpiri elder, Michael Nelson Jagamara. It depicts the place ‘Pikilyi’ where he was conceived. His nascent identity, host to the so-called spirit-being named ‘White Cockatoo’. But ‘nascent’ – what does it mean? It is the act or condition of coming into existence, beginning to form, grow and develop? This work also celebrates our collaborations over several decades – nascent in 1985. One of these collaborations The Call from Papunya 2018 is in the collection of the Tate Modern in London. IF THERE WERE ANYWHERE BUT DESERT.

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Artist: Joe Blundell 

Artwork title: Tormented Land 

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Artist: Joe Blundell

Artwork title: Tormented Land

Medium: oil and sand on linen

Size: 153 x 153 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
Extraordinarily, Australia is now the only developed nation designated a global hotspot for deforestation. Made using videos of deforestation in various parts of Australia and visiting sites, this painting is part of a series I’ve been working on for the past 12 months. I’m seeking to illuminate what forest destruction feels like after the machines have left the scene and all is quiet. Like a crime scene or a battlefield strewn with the sinewy vestiges of a torn down lifeform. Caterpillar tracks are the fingerprints that evidence this is destruction guided by the human hand, not a natural disaster.

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Artist: Julian Meagher 

Artwork title: First light over Cuttagee #2 

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Artist: Julian Meagher

Artwork title: First light over Cuttagee #2

Medium: oil on linen

Size: 153 x 122 cm

Year: 2025

Artist statement:
I see painting as a physical act of hope with poetic intention. I’m drawn to moments of transition, those brief passages of light and time that hold the possibility of renewal. Most of my work falls into a neo-romantic genre, where unconditional love and hope are represented mostly through imagined skyscapes or dreamscapes and optical phenomena. We look to the heavens for signs to guide us during times of hope and despair. Every sky is a rainbow, and every painting a rainbow in that sky.

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julian meagher - first light over cuttagee 2

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Artist: Kelsey Ashe 

Artwork title: Bunuru Nocture, Derbal Yerrigan (High-Summer Night, Swan River) 

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Artist: Kelsey Ashe

Artwork title: Bunuru Nocture, Derbal Yerrigan (High-Summer Night, Swan River)

Medium: unique state wax reduction screen print, botanical inks: indigofera tintura, chlorophyll from mulberry leaves, turmeric, musou ink (light absorbing black), photoluminescent pigments: europium, dysprosium, strontium aluminate (glow in the dark), wax on canvas.

Size: 160 x 140 cm

Year: 2026

Artist statement:
Visiting the Derbal Yerrigan by night, under a Bunuru moon, the landscape holds light differently. Limestone cliffs glow as if carrying the day and warm skies exhale in velvety darkness. Built through accumulated printed layers of translucent botanical inks and photo-luminescent earth-pigments, the work absorbs and re-emits light energy, thus shifting with its surroundings — brightening and dimming throughout the day then glowing mysteriously bright by night, in constant ebb and flow. Moonlight gathers across the river and rests in cliffs and trees, where faint presences dwell. The work behaves like the landscape itself: living, breathing, responsive, and quietly changing.

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kelsey ashe - bunuru nocture, derbal yerrigan high-summer night, swan river