Aboriginal fine art galleries are a way for non-Indigenous Australians to connect with Indigenous culture and heritage. Paintings, with their visual symbols and meanings, carry great cultural importance for Indigenous Australians across the country and belong to the world’s longest-continuing artistic tradition.
This NAIDOC Week, Mirri Leven, owner and director of Cooee Art Leven in Redfern, Australia’s oldest Aboriginal fine art gallery, spoke with B&T about the cultural importance of creativity in Indigenous art and its ability to provoke broader conversations within Australian society around reconciliation.
Leven joined what was then Cooee Art in 2007 and over the past 16 years has developed its gallery program, including exhibitions all over Australia and abroad.
B&T: NAIDOC Week celebrates and recognises the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. How can Indigenous fine art help non-Indigenous Australians connect to and understand Indigenous culture better?
Mirri Leven: It’s a good question — it’s what I’ve based my life on and the fundamentals of the gallery. Art and especially fine art has a really important role to play in that space. If every person in Australia had one Aboriginal painting on their walls, imagine the conversations that would start happening among people who don’t necessarily know much about it.
Aboriginal art is an oral language. A lot of stories passed down from generation to generation are told orally or drawn on cave walls and on bodies. It’s the oldest artistic culture in the world. It’s so deeply rooted in a cultural perspective and the way that you tell everything about history, culture, the law, how to do this, when to do this, everything is passed down orally and visually. The only way to better understand a culture is to sit down and listen to someone’s story.
By having the opportunity to connect with a painting, even if it’s on a simple level, just by going down to the MCA, you start picking up little bits of knowledge of culture through those paintings. And then if you start spending a little bit more time with the art and start hearing the stories associated with those paintings, you get a deeper understanding.
There is something to learn about each of these people’s history and culture within each of those paintings. If everyone can take little glimpses into someone else’s life, it starts to become less of the ‘other’ and more familiar.
Indigenous or First Nations art is not just about the dots or snakes on the canvas. It’s about the connection and the blood running through someone’s veins connected to that painting. It also exposes people to the idea that not everyone is painting dots and lives in the desert. There are people next door, and they’re all doing different things such as photography and printmaking, and they’ve all got unique perspectives and bring different elements to the craft.
B&T: How does the gallery market itself, especially in relation to its position as Australia’s oldest Indigenous fine art gallery? Are there any marketing challenges?
ML: Definitely not as well as we should. But it’s actually why I bought Kathryn Alley onboard as project coordinator, she’s going help us get our word out a little bit wider. We’ve always been focused on the art and the artists themselves and less focused on selling, which is a bit of a weird place to be. Therefore, marketing has been a bit of a second thought or a third or fourth thought.
Our website is our main source of traffic, so people specifically looking for a piece of Indigenous art go there. We advertise in all the local art magazines. People who are into art and go to exhibitions across Australia all get to see our latest collections. We have a rotating exhibition schedule of about six exhibitions a year. And then we do two auctions a year. Each of those specific events is marketed. So at the moment, we’ve got an exhibition up by an artist, and now we’re focusing on marketing that one.
B&T: How does the contemporary gallery space help creatives when it comes to diversity and inclusion? How can it empower young and emerging Indigenous creatives?
ML: It’s really hard to be an artist, not just an Indigenous artist, but an artist in general, and especially a young one.
They say about 6,000 Indigenous artists are working in Australia at the moment. The majority of those come through not-for-profit art centres set up by or backed by the government in various communities around Australia. If an artist is lucky enough to live in one of those communities with an art centre, their work automatically gets exposure. It gets around to all of the galleries, they generally get included in exhibitions across the world. Not every artist, but the majority of artists in art centres. So if you’re in one of those remote communities, then it’s kind of an existing platform already set up for you.
If you live outside of that model, say you live in Sydney or Bathurst then it can be very difficult to break in. There are some bodies, such as the Aboriginal Art Association of Australia, that sign up artists as part of their cohorts. Then it helps if they have connections to galleries, they can send through their paintings, they can know about any awards that are happening or prizes like the Paddington Art Prize.
Artists can go directly to galleries, but most galleries won’t take unsolicited phone calls. You just can’t represent everybody, there isn’t space. Cooee Art Leven is actually fairly rare in this industry, we have several artists that are outside of that art centre model that we work with.
The show that we have on at the moment is a Gadigal artist so obviously she’s outside of that model. She represents herself and her husband helps as well. She’s very educated and grew up within an urban system so she can talk the talk, which has helped her to open the door. We work with an artist based in Darwin and one in Adelaide.
The best advice I could give an Indigenous artist is to have a portfolio online, not necessarily a website but just information about your paintings and photographs of each one and like a little PDF catalogue or something and just send it to everyone you know. That would be my biggest recommendation.
B&T: What does Indigenous employment look like in the industry, and is this set to change? How does Coee Art Leven look to create employment opportunities, and what do these opportunities look like?
ML: There is far too little Indigenous representation in this industry. It would have to be one of the worst, to be honest. The art centres all have a lot of Indigenous workers who do various jobs. If they’re not an artist themselves, they’ll curate, they’ll do the admin side of it. They’ll work the art fairs, it just depends on the art centre and what’s needed.
There are a lot of barriers to getting a job in this industry, generally. Most people have an arts Master’s. It’s a very competitive field but it’s a great job if you can have a low salary. But you do it because of the passion. I do need people with an arts background, or at least a background that translates into the art space. A lot of the work that gets done in a gallery is not that art-related. Not everyone’s choosing the artworks or hanging them or curating exhibitions, which often only gets done by two people. Everything else that happens is sort of on the periphery of the arts, like the administration side, the marketing side, but there has to be an appreciation for it and understanding of it to be able to do that.
For us, anytime I’m looking for a new employee, I always prioritise Indigenous applicants. And I always call for Indigenous applicants at the very beginning of our applications. At the moment, we only have one Indigenous employee. I work with the local TAFE in Sydney, and I’ve got connections with both Sydney Uni and UNSW to try and get recommendations of people who might be looking for work.
All the institutional jobs, like the curators at the Museum of Contemporary Art, or the National Gallery, they’re all Indigenous. And they’ve worked their way up to get there. So some really great jobs are only open to Indigenous applicants and because there are so few applicants, there is the possibility for Indigenous employees to go all the way. If you’re passionate about it, I strongly believe that within five-ten years, the industry will be 90 per cent Indigenous rather than 10 per cent.
B&T: What is the background to Cooee Art Leven’s new relaunch, where it will exhibit non-Indigenous artists alongside First Nations artists? How important is diversity of collaboration in creative practice and the commercial goals of the gallery? Does this relaunch respond to a need for change in the industry?
ML: The gallery was started in 1981 by the previous owners and we worked as part-owners for the last 8 years. When he retired properly, we changed the name to signify the transition.
As to working with non-Indigenous artists, we’re doing so on a selective, workshop-based nature. We’ve only worked with one so far and we’ve got another one ready to go. The idea is that we’re taking non-Indigenous artists and a selected Indigenous artist to bring them together physically in the same place, whether that’s here in Sydney or in a remote community. They can have a chance to learn from one another and be exposed to art outside of their traditional setting.
A lot of the artists we work with in remote communities, their only exposure to the outside art world is through exhibitions they sometimes come to, but there are a lot of artists that don’t get to experience art outside the arts centres at all, except through books and the internet. Knowledge is power. So, getting a chance to work with a non-Indigenous artist, even just having a conversation about what drives them, getting the chance to explore different techniques, can be really powerful.
Diversity of knowledge and experience is important, but it’s not the only thing. The majority of what Indigenous artists are creating is such an ancient practice, so it’s not about changing that. It’s about having the opportunity to get exposure to other techniques that they can use in their own practice, or knowing that you want to continue the way you’ve been going. Seeing the other side and knowing what else is out there, and maybe choosing not to adopt it. That’s good, too. But for those who are curious about doing something different, they’ve got that opportunity.
B&T: What does creativity mean to you, in terms of commercial goals but also through the relationships you build with artists?
ML: My commercial goal is to put food on the table for my kid, but I don’t need a fancy roof over my head. I’d rather put my money back into the community. The more success that the business has, the more sales we make, and the more exposure we get, the whole point is for it to go back to the community. It’s one of the beautiful things about Indigenous culture in general, generally speaking, that when an artwork is sold by an artist, it doesn’t just go to them, it goes to the entire community. Emily Kngwarreye, when she was alive, her paintings were selling for three figures, which was huge, but she wasn’t a rich woman.
