Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this text will contain names of the deceased.

“Aboriginal Art is bought, sold and promoted from within the system, that is, Western Art consigns it to ‘Pigeon-holing’ within that system. Why can’t an Art movement arise and be separate from but equal to Western Art—within its own aesthetic, its own voices, its own infrastructure, etc.?”

—Richard Bell, “Bell’s Theorem”

It is not a stretch to assert that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists in Australia are ongoingly overlooked. Neither is it a stretch to see that such erasure is part and parcel of the structural racism—not to mention theft of land and inheritance—faced by Aboriginal Australians more broadly. And yet, to say that all Aboriginal art ends up erased, and dismissed, is far too simple a story to tell. There are those who will point to success stories: to the careers of artists such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, an artist whose abstract batik and acrylics went on to be featured in museums from Osaka, Japan, to Cologne, Germany.

But even while Aboriginal artists may find their share of successes, some of them have noticed that much of that recognition ends up parceled out to art that happens to conform to a constrictive vision of Aboriginal life as imagined by white settler culture. As Aboriginal artists have struggled for decades with the forces overdetermining the reception of their work, many have remarked on the disproportionate opportunities often conferred to so-called “traditional” art—art that has often come out of more remote northern and central desert communities. As curator and critic Margo Neale noted in Artlink Magazine:

In addition to the bias towards the authenticity of so-called traditional work, the remote north regions had a structural advantage. They had a collective identity. They were from named communities, often with distinct recognizable art styles, and they worked through government-funded art centers with access to a range of networks not available to any individual artist. [1]

Such socioeconomic conditions relegate Aboriginal art to the status of museum artifacts drawn solely from remote communities, leaving present-day urban Aboriginal artists and their work in a place of invisible limbo. It was under such conditions that the art collective proppaNOW was formed. First unofficially gathering in 1997, the group started out with members Richard Bell, Jennifer Herd, Vernon Ah Kee, Fiona Foley, Bianca Beetson, Andrea Fisher, and Tony Albert. Nearly a quarter century later in 2020, it now includes Gordon Hookey, Laurie Nilsen, and Megan Cope. The group was founded on principles of self-determination, with a mission to promote and uplift the perspectives of urban Aboriginal artists who were making all sorts of artwork, not just art that conformed to a narrow, palatable vision of what Indigenous people could do. proppaNOW drew inspiration for its name from the Indigenous phrase “proper way”: the way to proceed in a given situation that remains respectful to broader community standards.

What spurred the group to formalize its status as a collective was the 2004 formation of the Queensland Indigenous Artists Marketing Export Agency. proppaNOW’s members saw that the agency’s support for Queensland Indigenous art entirely excluded city-based Aboriginal artists. Jennifer Herd—a proppaNOW member who has been referred to, somewhat humorously in the other artists’ interviews, as the “matriarch” of the group—has spoken about this exclusion. Born in Brisbane, Herd grew up knowing little about her grandmother’s and mother’s stories. Through studying theater and fashion, and then eventually making art that addressed this disconnect, she eventually also sought out more about her roots. “I remember when I went looking for my mother,” she said “They wouldn’t give me any information, and I wrote her name down. And I said, you’ve got to help me, I can’t find any information on her.”[2]

Reflecting on the ways that urban Aboriginal artists have not only been disconnected from their heritage under the systemic oppression and generational trauma engendered by a colonial state but have also been marginalized and tokenized as artists, Herd has said, “I think urban artists are always put on the back burner, so to speak…. You see some of these remote area artists…get good representation, and a lot of attention…”[3] There is an irony that should not go overlooked: the Aboriginal artists whose daily lives are most upended by the rhythms of an imported settler culture—artists whose connections to the land and languages of their forebears have arguably been most subjected to rupture by a land-grab of vastly unjust proportions—have thus ended up the most invisible and least supported on a global art stage.

The decades of work done by proppaNOW’s members to counteract stereotypes and raise visibility for urban Aboriginal artists—and Aboriginal people more broadly, particularly those residing in urban settings—came to a head in the group’s standout 2021 show, OCCURRENT AFFAIR, at the University of Queensland Art Museum. The show’s title is a play on an Australian TV show, “A Current Affair,” a nightly news program broadcast since the 1970s that has often been criticized for its sensationalist bent.

Featuring drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, installations, and video, the wide-ranging show—as I understand from its documentation—encompassed a bold mix of abstraction and representation, wordplay and humor and grief, delving into updated responses to the question of what it means to be an urban Aboriginal artist working today. From Megan Cope’s use of fluorescent, glow-in-the-dark puns lampooning Rupert Murdoch’s empire (in Arsenal, 2021) to Vernon Ah Kee’s suspension of twelve riot shields in midair in Scratch the Surface, 2019, proppaNOW’s artists saw the exhibition as an opportunity to address topics ranging from media bias to police brutality. A community conversation titled “A Yarn Event,” which the group also staged at the museum, broadened the number of voices participating in the discussion. It brought in the Aboriginal perspectives of participants such as Lisa Whop, a Goemulgal epidemiologist specializing in cervical cancer among Aboriginal women, and Kevin Yow Yeh, a Wakka Wakka and South Sea Islander who, in his capacity as a social worker, has run a program that supports legal services, advocacy, and bail for Indigenous youth.

In the context of proppaNOW’s nomination for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, the group represents a critical contrast to a somewhat common model of social practice, of which I remain simultaneously admiring and skeptical: the sort of practice which, intentionally or not, draws a definitive bright line between the artist and their audience. The artist, on the one hand, appears from on high, with institutional support—while audience members, on the other hand, arrive ready to learn, participate, and ostensibly see some improvement in the conditions dictating the shape of their lives. This model of artmaking can be artificial and even condescending. It can bring with it a whiff of the Savior and the Saved.

What is truly commendable about the work done by proppaNOW is that, rather than forcing any such distinction between artist and participant, it has always acknowledged that the stakes of an artist’s practice directly reflect the broader conditions of the community in which they have roots. As such, artists advocating for their own cultural worth are contributing to a crucial part of what it means to re-narrate specific stories and histories in order to address a community’s erasure and bring the world toward a more just place. It is imperative that artmaking of this kind be considered in any global search for artists who are truly agents of social and political change.

This essay was originally written in nomination proppaNOW for their project OCCURRENT AFFAIR for the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice in the summer of 2022.

Dawn Chan is currently a contributing critic for the arts section of the New York Times, and serves on the faculty at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies.