Nonggirrnga Marawili

Nonggirrnga Marawili (c. 1939–2023) was an Australian Yolngu painter and printmaker.

Early life Nonggirrnga Marawili was born around 1939, the daughter of the acclaimed artist and pre-contact warrior Mundukul. Marawili was born on the beach at Darrpirra, near Djarrakpi (Cape Shield), as a member of the Madarrpa clan of the Yirritja moiety of the Yolngu people.

She grew up in both Yilpara and Yirrkala in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, but lived , meaning her family would move frequently, camping at Madarrpa clan-related sites between Blue Mud Bay and Groote Eylandt. Marawili died at Yirrkala in October 2023.

Career Early work and clan designs Marawili learnt how to paint on bark in the 1980s while assisting her husband, Djutadjuta Mununggurr, with his artwork depicting his designs from the Djapu clan. In her practice she depicts the sacred forms from her Madarrpa heritage and the stories shared with her by her father, Mundukul, and late husband. Printmaking Marawili's printmaking career started after art-coordinator Andrew Blake opened the Yirrkala Print Space in 1995. Regular painting and critical acclaim While she began her career in the 1990s, Marawili began painting regularly only in 2005. After encouragement from the art-coordinator Will Stubbs, she created Wititj (2005) and Untitled (2005) which demonstrate her ability to avoid painting the strictly traditional designs but rather subtly reference them. She claimed that these patterns were from her heart and mind, not depictions of sacred clan designs. This gave her the ability to explore and experiment to find her personal art style. Marawili reached acclaim soon after her 2013 exhibit And I am still here held at Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne which featured fifteen paintings and four larrakitj (memorial poles). In a 2013 interview she stated that the fire she painted is "just an ordinary fire, not a Madarrpa fire". She also won the Bark Painting Award at the 36th Telstra Awards in 2019, one of the most prestigious honours for Aboriginal artists. ), an ancestral snake who uses lightning and thunder to communicate with other ancestral snakes. However, since 2015 she has been granted the ability to paint some clan designs that connect the Madarrpa to the estate of Baratjula which was a seasonal camp for Marawili as a child and is associated with ancestral trade with Macassan merchants. In his review, Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald considered her "one of the most dynamic Indigenous artists at work today". The exhibition was documented in a stand-alone book of the same name. In 2020 her work was featured at the Sydney Biennale at the Campbelltown Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. As posited by Henry F. Skerritt and Hetti Perkins, Marawili and her contributors' place outside the traditional patriarchal structure has allowed them to be the "dynamic backbone" of Aboriginal artwork in the modern day, as they work around the rules set in place. Collections holding works by Marawili Marawili's works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Significant exhibitions

2013: And I am still here. Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, Vic 2015: All watched over. James Cohan Gallery, Manhattan, NYC 2016-2019: Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia. Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, FL; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. 2017: Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT. 2018-2019: Nonggirrnga Marawili: From My Heart and Mind. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW. 2020: By the Strength of Her Skin. Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia. 2020: Nirin: The 22nd Biennale of Sydney. Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, NSW. 2021: Bark Ladies: Eleven Artists from Yirrkala. National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria. 2022-2025: Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala. Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center; Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia; and the Asia Society in New York City

Collections Art Gallery of New South Wales Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory National Gallery of Australia National Gallery of Victoria Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia