Wintjiya Napaltjarri

Wintjiya Napaltjarri (also spelt Wentjiya, Wintjia or Wentja; born ; died 2014), also known as Wintjia Napaltjarri No. 1, the Art Gallery of New South Wales suggests 1932; The ambiguity around the year of birth is in part because Indigenous Australians have a different conception of time, often estimating dates by comparisons with the occurrence of other events.

Napaljarri (in Warlpiri) or Napaltjarri (in Western Desert dialects) is a skin name, one of sixteen used to denote the subsections or subgroups in the kinship system of central Australian Indigenous people. These names define kinship relationships that influence preferred marriage partners and may be associated with particular totems. Although often used as terms of address, they are not surnames in the sense used by Europeans. Thus Wintjiya is the element of the artist's name that is specifically hers. She is sometimes referred to as Wintjia Napaltjarri No. 1;

Wintjiya came from an area north-west the two women being the second and third wives of Toba Tjakamarra, father (by his first wife, Nganyima Napaltjarri) of one of the prominent founders of the Papunya Tula art movement, Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula.

Art

Background

Contemporary Indigenous art of the western desert began in 1971 when Indigenous men at Papunya created murals and canvases using western art materials, assisted by teacher Geoffrey Bardon. Their work, which used acrylic paints to create designs representing body painting and ground sculptures, rapidly spread across Indigenous communities of central Australia, particularly after the introduction of a government-sanctioned art program in central Australia in 1983. By the 1980s and '90s, such work was being exhibited internationally. The first artists, including all of the founders of the Papunya Tula artists' company, were men, and there was resistance among the Pintupi men of central Australia to women also painting. However, many of the women wished to participate, and in the 1990s many of them began to paint. In the western desert communities such as Kintore, Yuendumu, Balgo, and on the outstations, people were beginning to create art works expressly for exhibition and sale. When the women of Kintore, including sisters Wintjiya and Tjunkiya, started creating canvasses, their works bore little resemblance to those of their male peers (who had been painting for some years). Twenty-five women were involved in planning the works, which included three canvases that were square, as well as two that were ; Tjunkiya and Wintjiya performed a ceremonial dance as part of the preparations. As was the case for Makinti Napanangka, an operation to remove cataracts resulted in a new brightness to Wintjiya's compositions. In the early 2000s Wintjiya and her sister painted at Kintore, but in 2008 they were working from their home: "the widows' camp outside her 'son' Turkey Tolson's former residence".

Tjunkiya and her sister Wintjiya did not confine their activities to painting canvases. In 2001 the National Gallery of Victoria purchased a collaborative batik, created by the sisters in cooperation with several other artists, together with one completed by Wintjiya alone. These works were the product of a batik workshop run for the women of Haasts Bluff by Northern Territory Education Department staff Jill Squires and Therese Honan in the months following June 1994. The works, including several by Wintjiya, were not completed until 1995. Circular markings, used by Wintjiya in both these batiks and her subsequent paintings, represent the eggs of the flying ant (waturnuma), one of the main subjects of her art. She also portrays "tree-like organic motifs" and representations of hair-string skirts (nyimparra).

Wintjiya's work was included in a survey of the history of Papunya Tula painting hosted by Flinders University in the late 1990s. Reviewing the exhibition, Christine Nicholls remarked of Wintjiya's Watanuma that it was a germinal painting, with fine use of muted colour, and showed sensitivity to the relationships between objects and spaces represented in the work. Likewise, Marina Strocchi has noted the contrast between some of the subtle colours used in batik and Wintjiya's characteristic painting palette, which is "almost exclusively stark white with black or red". Another of her works, Country west of Kintore, was accepted as a finalist in 2008. Works by Wintjiya have appeared in many significant exhibitions including: Papunya Women group exhibition (Utopia Art Gallery, Sydney, 1996); In 2013, she was one of sixteen finalists in the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards.

Works by Wintjiya are held in major private collections such as Nangara (also known as the Ebes Collection). Her work has been acquired by several major public art institutions including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory,

In 2018 Wintjiya's work was included in the exhibition Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia at The Phillips Collection.

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

Awards 2007 – finalist, 24th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award 2008 – finalist, 25th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award