Kluge-Ruhe wins major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities!
Maḏayin curators Wukun Waṉambi and Henry Skerritt working on the exhibition at the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala. Photo by Dave Wickens.
In July 2020 the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia was awarded a $300,000 Public Humanities Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the touring exhibition Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala. Curator Henry Skerritt has been working on the exhibition since 2015 in close collaboration with Indigenous artists and curators in Australia, including Wukun Waṉambi and Djambawa Marawili who have made several visits to Charlottesville, working with faculty and students in art history and studio. Graduate student Eleanore Neumann is also working on the project, and received a grant from the Mapping Indigenous Worlds Lab to develop digital materials for the exhibition. The exhibition will open at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth in September 2022, before traveling to Washington DC; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; concluding at the Fralin Museum of Art at UVA in August 2024.
Maḏayin curators Yinimala Gumana, Wukun Waṉambi, Kade McDonald and Henry Skerritt inspect a historic work by Mathaman Marika in the Kluge-Ruhe collection. Photo by Dan Addison, UVA Communications.
Maḏayin curators Kade Mcdonald, Wäka Munuŋgurr, Djambawa Marawili AM and Henry Skerritt working on Madayin at Kluge-Ruhe. Photo by Callie Collins (Anthropology/Spanish 2020).