Kaapa Tjampitjinpa

Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa ( 1920 – 1989) was a contemporary Indigenous Australian artist of Anmatyerre, Warlpiri and Arrernte heritage. One of the earliest and most significant artists at Papunya in Australia's Northern Territory in the early 1970s, he was a founding member and inaugural chairman of the Papunya Tula artists company, and pivotal to the establishment of modern Indigenous Australian painting.

Life Kaapa was born west of Napperby Station in the 1920s. His father was Kwalapa Tjangala, a senior Aboriginal man who had ritual responsibility for a site known as Warlugulong, which would subsequently be portrayed by several different artists in major paintings such as Warlugulong (1976) and Warlugulong (1977). Kaapa was initiated on Napperby Station, and was a stockman at nearby Mount Riddock Station.

Kaapa later worked on a station at Haasts Bluff. While he moved to Papunya in the 1960s, In 1971 a local official, Jack Cooke, took six of Kaapa's paintings from Papunya into Alice Springs, entering one of them in a local competition, the Caltex Art Award. On 27 August that picture, Gulgardi, also referred to as Men’s Ceremony for the Kangaroo, Gulgardi, shared the first prize with a work by Jan Wesley Smith. It was the first work by an Indigenous Australian artist to win a contemporary art award, and the first public recognition of a Papunya painting.

Kaapa's paintings were probably the earliest to come out of Papunya and the art movement that subsequently made the settlement famous. Gulgardi was described by the National Gallery of Victoria: "Kaapa's work, with its pictorial elements and seductive delicacy of detail, is cultivated to appeal to the western gaze. It also recreates the dramatic spectacle of men participating in ceremony and creates an illusion of the third dimension." while the National Museum of Australia also holds a number of his works. Internationally, his work can be found in the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

A painting by Kaapa, The Winparrku Serpents, was rendered in tapestry by the Victorian Tapestry Workshop for the Arts Centre Melbourne, and was the first of the Centre's tapestries. Three paintings by Kaapa have been listed on Australia's Movable Cultural Heritage Prohibited Exports Register. Inclusion on the register is confined to "objects of exceptional cultural importance, whose export would significantly diminish Australia's cultural heritage" and requires a permit to be issued for sale of the item outside Australia. Two of his works, Budgerigar Dreaming and Water Dreaming, both painted in 1972, in 2000 became the first works to be refused permits under the legislation.