Bits of Australia's Desert

On a recent mid-week snow day I took the kids to the Kluge-Ruhe Museum just east of downtown Charlottesville. It houses a small remarkable collection of Australian aboriginal art. We spent about an hour examining the unique paintings of men and women from three settlements in Australia's interior desert. Until forty years ago these designs, which depict creation stories thousands of years old, were only created in the sand and painted temporarily on the bodies of the storytellers. Now this artwork is captured on canvas for our appreciation. It is unlike any other artwork I have seen in this type of gallery.

 

We filled out the scavenger hunt pages provided by the museum and read the short stories of wallabies, mice, and working women. We watched media presentations in which we heard a few different languages spoken by people surrounded by the desert dust. We noticed the shapes and colors and tried to understand the symbols. I was so amazed by my three kids' ability to take all of this in, but I was quick to move along when they started losing patience.

This was my favorite moment. A had just identified this tall seemingly, simple painting of the tracks of two wallabies as her favorite. The boys walked away and I came around the front of her to take a photo of the painting on the opposite wall. That's when she started giggling.

"The lines are wiggling!" 

You had to patiently allow your eyes to relax, but without a doubt they appeared to wiggle as you stood still.

I decided my favorite painting was the one behind A and E--it's a thousand-year old design depicting three women making cakes from seed flour they had just produced. 

I failed to take snapshots of the entrance gallery of artists, the second focus of our short visit. The museum loaned us an iPad to scan the QR codes to access movies about some of the artists who had created the paintings in the interior galleries. 

The third focus of our visit was the photography exhibit. The twenty-minute film of Nici Cumpston's hand-coloring process helped us to appreciate her interpretation of the Australian desert's beauty.

Of all the art we saw that day, the boys agreed these photography pieces were their favorites. E loved the ones of the rock walls, and J admired the Fossil Creek piece.

This visit renewed my desire to challenge my kids with new learning opportunities. They had strongly resisted this outing, but seemed so comfortable in the informal quiet gallery once we were there. The elements of media effectively transferred so much information they wouldn't have been patient enough to listen to me read from a plaque. I'm wondering which museums nearby I might too quickly be dismissing as an option for a visit.