Abstract Aboriginal paintings on view at Wright Museum

Even well-informed art aficionados are likely to draw a blank when confronted with the phrase "Aboriginal Australian Art." And if anything at all comes to mind, it's almost certainly not the kind of colorfully painted abstract canvases included in the "No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Painting" on view through May 15 at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

The show, which includes more than 75 paintings made since 1992 by nine Aboriginal men, is drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl of Miami, Fla. Dennis Scholl, a longtime champion of the Detroit art scene, who recently completed his tenure as vice president of arts for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is giving a gallery talk about the collection at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Wright Museum.

"No Boundaries"  — which was previously seen at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and Miami's Perez Art Museum (where Scholl is a board member) — is about introducing American audiences to a vital new branch of contemporary art. It's also about breaking down preconceptions and stereotypes and connecting the dots between Aboriginal painting and wider currents in the art world.

The show was organized by William L. Fox, director of the Center and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, and scholar Henry Skerritt.

When most people think of art by native peoples, whether its Aborigines of Australia, the Inuit of the Arctic Canada or Native Americans, the first things that come to mind are typically traditional objects related to daily life or perhaps realistic works of art that tell clear narratives. But contemporary art associated with all of these cultures actually represents a diversity of styles and ideas.

With their mix of geometric patterns, biomorphic shapes, rhythmic use of color and line and mark-making that can be freely gestural or meticulously composed, the paintings in "No Boundaries" are of a piece with abstract painting from all over the globe. Yet at the same time, artists in the show — among them Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri (born circa 1958) and the late Ngarra, Tommy Mitchell and Paddy Bedford — are also working within a deep reservoir of unique cultural stories, traditions, geography and spiritualism.

The work is at once universal and specific in its artistic means, cultural resonance and emotional meaning.

"As we look across the vast expanse that is contemporary abstract painting, we find many points of commonality between Western and Aboriginal practices," writes Jens Hoffmann, deputy director of the Jewish Museum and curator at large for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, in the catalog for "No Boundaries"

"Like the Aboriginal artists in this exhibition, these contemporary painters may speak in the language of abstraction, but they are still saying something. Look behind the abstract imagery and you will find parallel stories of history, people and place."

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