“She just painted her country, and all things that were significant to her,” says Kelli Cole, the co-curator of a major survey of the late Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. “Kama, which is seed, the pencil yam, emu; awelye, the Anmatyerr word for ceremony; and Alhalker, which is her country—those [themes] are in every one of her works.”

The exhibition, which includes textiles, works on paper and paintings, has been assembled by Cole and fellow Indigenous curator Hetti Perkins, and will chart the career of an artist who, with no knowledge of international visual arts practice, managed to create a vast body of work comparable with the likes of Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt and Ellsworth Kelly.

Kngwarray (1910-96) was from Utopia, an Aboriginal community 250km north-east of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory. Although she had produced textile designs on fabric since 1977, it was Kngwarray’s first work on canvas, Emu Woman (1988-89), made for a landmark group exhibition organised by Utopia’s art coordinator Rodney Gooch in 1988, that saw her receive widespread attention. Featuring distinctive gestural brushstrokes used in traditional women’s ceremony, and dots in white, yellow and reddish brown representing the underground seedpods of the pencil yam, Emu Woman demonstrated Kngwarray’s propensity to express her rich culture on canvas.

From 1988 until her death eight years later, Kngwarray produced around 3,000 paintings—roughly one per day. During this period, demand for her work was so high that the gallerist Christopher Hodges regularly chartered a plane to drop off fresh canvases and whisk away finished paintings. Consequently “there wasn’t much story [about each work] that they could get from her”, Cole says. Kngwarray would simply say “untitled” or “awelye [ceremonial]” to Gooch, and “he thought she didn’t want to give much more information”, Cole explains.

When Kngwarray’s works went on show, alongside those of fellow Australian artists Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson at the Venice Biennale in 1997, many critics assumed she was an anomaly. But as Perkins, who also curated the Venice show, explained at the time: “The possibilities of Aboriginal art practice are infinite and can have relevance and resonance outside their immediate cultural context while maintaining the integrity of speaking from within that context.”

Kngwarray’s meteoric rise resulted in her being singled out from her community, but this show aims to “reposition Emily back into her community”, Cole says. “It was [her] story that she painted, but [the Anmatyerr] people are still painting that same story,” Cole adds. Now, through extensive consultation, Kngwarray’s descendants are telling her story and revealing new details about the artist’s work. The curator gives as an example a “couple of paintings that have this amazing, lush green that no one’s ever identified before” but when it was shown to the Anmatyerr women, the green was immediately recognised as the distinctive colour of emu eggs from a creation story. “Every single photograph, every painting, every quote, everything has been taken back to the community for her family descendants and the artists that we’ve worked with to approve,” Cole says.

Another change, following consultation with the community, has been the NGA’s adoption of the Anmatyerr spelling of Kngwarray’s name, in contrast to the previously widespread use of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

The exhibition will include several important loans, such as early batiks, two recent NGA acquisitions, and Alhalkere—Old Man Emu with Babies (1989), acquired by the actor Steve Martin at the Sotheby’s New York Aboriginal art auction in May 2022. The show will not only be the most comprehensive survey of one of Australia’s most “significant artists”, Cole says, but it will also position Kngwarray “within her community that she never left—in a sense that was the biggest part of her life.”

• Emily Kam Kngwarray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2 December-28 April 2024; Tate Modern, London, opening 2025

“At Lynn, I wasn’t just a number, I had relationships with faculty,” said Buckle. “The personal environment at Lynn made it possible for me to finish my degree on time. The small class sizes and my close relationship with my professors helped me get through those harsh times.”

Buckle moved back home to Connecticut and went to Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, where she fortunately received life-changing care. It took three additional hip surgeries to correct the issues she encountered in her original operation.

Now came a crucial moment in Buckle’s life. A career in hospitality now seemed impossible—the extent of her injury did not allow her to keep up with the physical demands required by the job. Despite this adversity, Buckle stayed grounded and harked back to the experiences she garnered growing up with her family. She pivoted her focus to her love of art.

“I had always loved art. I took art history classes, I visited museums, galleries and art fairs,” said Buckle. “Even while I was a hospitality student at Lynn, I was doing all these things.”

What began as a hobby turned into a new career path. Buckle pursued her M.A. in art business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York City.

“I now had a real-world approach to art. You must welcome the public into your space; you must anticipate social trends, what people appreciate and what appeals to them,” said Buckle. “That knowledge came from my hospitality background at Lynn.”

Founded in 1954, the Dance Magazine Awards have historically only been given to living artists. This year’s new posthumous honors were created to recognize some of the many artists active since 1954 who were not given awards during their lifetimes. The Dance Magazine Awards, which have a theme of education, will be presented at Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center, 92NY, in New York City on Monday, December 4, 2023.

Syvilla Fort

Later, her name would be associated with the brightest stars of Hollywood, Broadway, and concert dance—Marlon Brando, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Eartha Kitt, Chita Rivera, Geoffrey Holder, Alvin Ailey, Chuck Davis, Yvonne Rainer. Yes, dance educator Syvilla Fort taught them all and more. But her influential teaching career started more modestly while she was still a youth in her native Seattle.

Born in 1917, Fort learned early, as a Black girl eager for ballet, that race and class could be impediments to professional training and a career pathway. Local dance schools refused to admit her, and this bitter lesson inspired her to open her own door to marginalized students in her community. She started to teach at age 9, and her commitment to education and access held steady through a lifetime of accomplishments.

Offered a full scholarship to Seattle’s Cornish School of Allied Arts (now Cornish College of the Arts), Fort became its first Black student and created work in collaboration with avant-garde composer John Cage. She also danced for several years in the legendary company of Katherine Dunham, absorbing the breadth of Dunham’s knowledge of African and Afro-Atlantic culture and movement. After a knee injury cut her performing career short, she served as chief administrator and instructor in the Katherine Dunham School of Dance, later opening her own school and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University.

When we note the lasting contributions of Black artists to ballet and postmodern dance, fields previously dominated by white bodies, we must also remember Syvilla Fort’s pioneering efforts and her outspoken advocacy for inclusion and social justice in dance.

Gregory Hines

A consummate artist and much-loved entertainer, Gregory Hines would have turned 77 this year had he survived the cancer that took him in August 2003.

When artists master more than one skill, they are often called “double threats,” even “triple threats.” With Hines, you could lose count. Since toddlerhood, Hines steadily built his career in the arts, growing to light up the worlds of stage, film, and television as dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, musician, director, and teacher. His star blazed as the near-forgotten art of tap enjoyed its first major revival and newfound popularity. With his creative skill, irrepressible zest, and charisma, Hines served as a bridge between two great eras of tap dance—old-school veterans like Charles “Honi” Coles, Bunny Briggs, and Sandman Sims, and crusading innovators like Savion Glover and Jane Goldberg, followed by today’s superstars, like Ayodele Casel and Dormeshia. Hines was there to catch the torch and pass it on just as he said his friend, the multitalented and world-renowned Sammy Davis Jr., had passed it along to him.

Fans of tap thank Hines also for his advocacy in lobbying the U.S. Congress to create the annual National Tap Dance Day (May 25), which launched in 1989 and has since gone international. And, like one of many recent honors awarded to Ms. Casel, in 2019, Hines received the distinction of becoming the face of a United States Postal Service Forever Stamp.

An ambassador of tap, Hines continues to be cited, year after year, as a mentor, friend, and inspiration to many. By giving tap an elevated place among his many talents, Hines assured not only that historic and contemporary Black rhythm tap would get more exposure but that dance, overall, would reach more hearts across the U.S. and beyond.

Pearl Primus

A native of Trinidad, Pearl Primus built her long, distinguished career in choreography and education on immersive research into African and African-diasporic cultures. As she wrote in a 1979 statement, dance became her vehicle and language; her freedom and her world; her medicine and strength; her scream and fist; her teacher.

In 1941, discouraged by racism in academia, Primus shifted from biology/premed studies and took up with the artist-activists of New York City’s New Dance Group, becoming its first Black student. The influence of Sierra Leone–born musician and dance artist Asadata Dafora helped this young scholarship recipient define her life’s work. Primus’ later anthropology field studies, choreography, and innovative staging of traditional dances would have significant impact on the world’s appreciation for the dances of Africa and the Caribbean and the experiences of Black people in the American South. Her work reached historic and illustrious concert stages—from her 1943 debut at 92nd Street Y to Carnegie Hall, Broadway, Jacob’s Pillow, and many international venues. Primus earned a doctorate in anthropology from New York University in 1978 and was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1991.

An electrifying performer, Primus was also notable for thrilling stagecraft. Rather than approach source cultures and communities in exploitive, extractive ways to merely entertain, Primus opened an intellectual and emotional gateway for audiences, rooting her work in authentic contexts, technical excellence, and political meaning.

Primus was not content to dream up dances in her studio. She sought to move hearts towards compassion and social justice. To develop Hard Time Blues (1945), for example, she labored alongside Southern sharecroppers, gaining direct understanding of their struggles. Some of her most notable works deal forthrightly with racist violence—lynchings (Strange Fruit, 1943) and the bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama (Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore, 1979). Her profound influence continues in the progressive, community-focused aims and methods of dancemakers today, such as Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Zollar’s Urban Bush Women lineage of artists, and Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine of Brother(hood) Dance!

Helen Tamiris

Helen Tamiris lived an exemplary New York story. Daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side—different sources give her birth year as 1902, 1903, or 1905—Helen Becker renamed herself Tamiris, aligning with the ancient warrior queen of a nomadic Persian people.

A brief, unhappy stint in the corps de ballet of the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet troupe followed early training in Isadora Duncan–inspired modern dance at the historic Henry Street Settlement Playhouse. In the 1930s, she discovered her own voice as a choreographer and educator, eventually partnering with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman to found and direct Dance Repertory Theatre, an early example of an artist cooperative in dance. She also launched the School of American Dance and her own first ensemble.

During the Great Depression, concerned about widespread unemployment in her field, Tamiris successfully lobbied the Works Progress Administration, part of FDR’s New Deal initiative, to build an employment program for dance artists, comparable to what the WPA offered the theater industry. The Dance Project ran for four years, with Tamiris as its chief dancemaker. In 1939, the WPA fell victim to growing political polarization, similar to what we face today, as fiscal and social conservatives cut further Congressional funding. In the 1940s, Tamiris moved on to Broadway, finding success making dance for musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and Touch and Go, for which she won a Tony.

Her courage in addressing poverty, discrimination, antisemitism, and war in her works and to train and employ Black dancers likely led her to be less celebrated than other giants of modern dance of her time. But we can consider Helen Tamiris a courageous progenitor of today’s dance artists grappling with similar issues of representation, culture, and conscience.

A new gateway to the University of Notre Dame continues the University’s long legacy of commitment to the arts. Welcoming visitors from across the country, the new Raclin Murphy Museum of Art opens its doors to the public Friday (Dec. 1).

The new 70,000-square-foot building on the northeast corner of Eddy Street and Angela Boulevard is designed by the award-winning firm Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA). Recognized as a leader in classical-inspired architecture, RAMSA has designed an expanded home for the University’s robust art collections that honors both tradition and innovation. The building’s brick, cast stone and Indiana limestone exterior blends with other historic buildings on campus. The new museum, occupying a prominent intersection where the University’s campus meets the greater community, will anchor and function as a gateway to an expanding on-campus arts district.

Inside, the museum’s 23 historically thematic galleries unfold around a multilevel atrium that rises to a central skylight. Classical yet contemporary, the light-flooded atrium greets visitors with works from the Raclin Murphy collection and orients them to the building’s upper and lower floors, connected by two grand staircases. A bookstore is nestled in the central atrium alongside Ivan’s Cafe, named for the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, who taught and worked at Notre Dame from 1955 until his death in 1962.

“Since its founding, Notre Dame has valued the vital role the visual arts play as an expression of human creativity, religious experience and insight into the human condition,” said University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. “By bringing the collections currently in the Snite Museum of Art to new life in the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, we will be able to share these treasures in all their richness with our University community, our neighbors in the region and the wider world.”

In addition to education spaces, a teaching gallery, an object study center and a chapel, the state-of-the-art galleries serve as a dramatic backdrop to works from the University’s art collection, which encompasses more than 30,000 objects. With origins that date to 1875, the collection has grown into one of the most significant and extensive collections of any academic museum in the country, with works representing many of the principal cultures and periods of world art history. The museum’s paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, drawings, textiles, baskets and decorative arts offer visitors a broad view of global proportions.

“The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art makes an essential contribution to Notre Dame’s strategy as a global Catholic research university for the 21st century,” said John T. McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost of Notre Dame. “The stunning exhibition spaces and the luminous works of art they contain will captivate us with their beauty, spark important conversations in the classroom and beyond and enable us to think in new ways about our past, present and future.”

“The permanent collection, which will celebrate its sesquicentennial in 2025, has been reinstalled with new life and vigor, giving visitors the opportunity to reconnect with and experience cherished artworks from a new perspective,” said Joseph Antenucci Becherer, director of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.

“Our search for knowledge is endless. It joins earth and sky.”

Newly commissioned works by globally renowned artists are integrated into the fabric of the building design, beginning with “Endless,” a 36-foot stainless steel sculpture by Jaume Plensa positioned outside of the museum entrance. Reflecting on his visits to the University and its mission, the artist noted, “Our search for knowledge is endless. It joins earth and sky.” The work of art features alphabets in eight languages and symbolizes Notre Dame’s commitment to diversity, internationalization, knowledge and global service.

A monumental carved text panel on the front facade of the building reads, “We are in the midst of reality responding with joy.” The meaningful work of art by Jenny Holzer welcomes visitors to the new Raclin Murphy Museum of Art and sets the tone for the renewed spaces inside, merging tradition and innovation in an effort to resonate with audiences from around the world.

Stepping into the atrium will reveal a circular terrazzo and bronze floor installation by Kiki Smith. “Sea of Stars,” one of the artist’s largest public projects to date, features 39 hand-drawn and cast stars inspired by celestial images frequently seen in medieval, Renaissance and Byzantine depictions of the Madonna as protectress and “Star of the Sea.” Also prominently mounted in the atrium is Maya Lin’s “St. Joseph (River) Watershed,” a reflection on our shared natural environment. The expansive relief with shimmering recycled silver honors the region’s Indigenous people and celebrates the unique geographic, sociological and environmental elements of the St. Joseph River and watershed.

Mimmo Paladino’s artistry adorns the museum’s Mary, Queen of Families chapel, a sacred space for contemplation and Masses. Paladino’s stained-glass window, incised wall frescoes and mosaic artwork on the ceiling are the result of extensive research of the University of Notre Dame, the Congregation of Holy Cross, Marian iconography and the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. The large-scale commission will complement the medieval and Renaissance altarpieces in the chapel, offering a unique curatorial opportunity to consider the link between art history and the history of the Catholic Church.

The Raclin Murphy Museum will also unveil new acquisitions by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Zhang Huan, Dietrich Klinge, Julie Mehretu, David Ocelotl Garcia, Jamie Okuma, Yinka Shonibare, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Dana Warrington, Jason Wesaw and others. The recent acquisitions and newly commissioned art will elevate the museum’s holdings of global works and complement objects from the permanent collection, many of which underwent conservation or professional cleaning before being moved to the new building.

Located in the 9-acre Charles B. Hayes Family Sculpture Park, the museum’s location allows for the continued growth of its outdoor sculpture collection. The park installation will feature new acquisitions by Sir Anthony Caro, Dietrich Klinge, Clement Meadmore, Louise Nevelson, Beverly Pepper and Ursula von Rydingsvard among others and provide a new environment for works by Deborah Butterfield, Peter Randall-Page and George Rickey. The park’s landscape architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh, was retained for the horticultural design.

“Designed for both education and enjoyment, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art is a place where campus and community can experience the richness of Notre Dame’s art and sculpture collections together,” said Melissa DelVecchio, partner at RAMSA.

The newly opened Raclin Murphy building is dedicated to exhibition and educational spaces. The larger vision for the museum includes additional galleries and spaces for teaching, a works-on-paper study center, administrative and curatorial offices and open collections storage. The timeline for these additional elements is to be determined.

“Along with my dedicated colleagues, we say welcome to what is and what can be. Nurturing an ongoing culture of learning through art, we’ve realized this new space to bring the campus and national community together. We have built a building and filled its spaces, but only together can we give the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art the soul it merits,” Becherer said.

The late Ernestine Raclin and her daughter and son-in-law Carmen and Chris Murphy are the lead benefactors of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. Admission to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art is free. For more information, visit raclinmurphymuseum.nd.edu.