Background

The contemporary Indigenous Australian art movement began in the western desert in 1971, when Indigenous men at Papunya took up painting, led by elders such as Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, and assisted by teacher Geoffrey Bardon.^[8] This initiative, which used acrylic paints to create designs representing body painting and ground sculptures, rapidly spread across Indigenous communities of central Australia, particularly following the commencement of a government-sanctioned art program in central Australia in 1983.^[9] By the 1980s and 1990s, such work was being exhibited internationally.^[10] The first artists, including all of the founders of the Papunya Tula artists' company, had been men, and there was resistance amongst the Pintupi men of central Australia to women painting.^[11] However, many women in the communities wished to participate, and in the 1990s many began to create paintings. In the western desert communities such as Kintore, Yuendumu, Balgo, and on the outstations, people were beginning to create art works expressly for exhibition and sale.^[10] In this context, in Alice Springs, Dorothy Napangardi began to learn alongside Polly Watson Napangardi, Margaret Lewis and Eunice Napangardi.^[6]

Career

In 2001 Napangardi won first prize in the 18th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award for her work Salt on Mina Mina, after winning lesser prizes in the same festival in 1991 and 1999.

She had many exhibitions in Australia and overseas. In 2002, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney hosted an exhibition (Dancing up country)^[12] of Napangardi's work. Discussing the artist's work, expert Christine Nicholls wrote that "Dorothy Napangardi’s success as an artist lies in her ability to evoke a strong sense of movement on her canvases, an effect she achieves because of her remarkable spatial sense and compositional ability... [Her work] can be appreciated on multiple levels", though indigenous commentators tend to see painting as "a stage for human activity, rather than seeing the geometric aspects of the work."^[13] At the time of the exhibition, fellow artist Kathleen Petyarre thought there were parallels between Napangardi's approach to her work and that of Emily Kngwarreye.^[14]

Internationally, US-based Crown Point Press published a series of her prints and exhibited her paintings and prints in its gallery in San Francisco. The Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco exhibited her paintings in a solo exhibition in 2005. She was included in a range of group shows, including in 2001 at the Sammlung Essl Museum in Vienna, Austria.^[5]

Napangardi’s work is found in many museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra;^[15] the National Gallery of Victoria,^[16] the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide,^[17] Queensland Museum, Brisbane, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney,^[18] the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, the Linden Museum, Stuttgart, Germany, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

She lived and worked in Alice Springs.