Fred R. Myers

Ph.D. 1976, M.A. 1972, Bryn Mawr, B.A. 1970, Amherst.

Indigenous people and politics, Aboriginal Australia; exchange theory and material culture; anthropology of art and contemporary artworlds; the production and circulation of culture; in identity and personhood; theories of value and practices of signification.

Books and Edited Volumes:

Six Paintings from Papunya: a Conversation.  Fred Myers and Terry Smith. Under consideration, Duke University Press.

Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu (Past and Present Together):  Fifty Years of Papunya Tula Artists. Edited volume with Henry Skerritt.  Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press.  2022

The Australian Art Field:  Practices, Policies, Institutions. Routledge Research in Art History. edited with Tony Bennett, Deborah Stevenson and Tamara Winikoff.  Routledge Research in Art History. 2020.  (winner of Best Anthology Prize, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2021)

The Difference that Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields.  Edited with Timothy Rowse and Laurence Bamblett.  Canberra:  Aboriginal Studies Press. 2019

Experiments in Self-Determination:  Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia. Edited volume with Nicolas Peterson  Canberra: Australian National University Press. 2016.

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press. 2002

The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Edited volume. Santa Fe: SAR Press. 2001


The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Anthropology and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995

Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash., D.C. (reprinted in paperback by University of California Press, 1991) 1986.


Film:

Remembering Yayayi. Directors, Pip Deveson, Fred Myers, Ian Dunlop.


Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

   ---- and Deborah Stevenson, Tony Bennett, Tamara Winikoff

 2020  “Introduction: The Australian Art Field — Frictions and Futures.” In Bennett, Stevenson, Myers and Winikoff, eds.  The Australian Art Field:  Practices, Policies, Markets.  Routledge Research in Art History.  Pp 1-12.

 2020 “The Work of Art:  Hope, Disenchantment and Indigenous Art.”  In Bennett, Stevenson, Myers and Winikoff, eds.  The Australian Art Field:  Practices, Policies, Markets.  Routledge Research in Art History. Pp 209-221

------- and Lisa Stefanoff

2019 “‘We Never Had An Photos of My Family’: Archival Return, Film and a Personal History.”  In Barwick, L., J Green, and P. Varzon-Morel, eds. Archival returns in central Australia and beyond, Special publication of Language Documentation and Conservation, 18.  Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

------- with Anna Weinreich

2019 “Verdopplungen.”  In Meret Kupczyk, Ludger Schwarte, Charlotte Warsen, eds. Kulturtechnik Malen [Painting as Cultural Technique].  Pp. 175-186.  Berlin: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Translation of “Doubling” (2016).

------- and Eugenia Kisin

2019 “The Anthropology of Art, After the End of Art.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48. 

-------and Tim Rowse and Lawrence Bamblett  

2019 “Introduction: The Difference that Identity Makes.” In Bramblett, Myers, and Rowse, eds. Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields, pp 1-37. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

2019 “Recalibating the visual field: Indigenous curators and Contemporary art.”  In Bramblett, Myers, and Rowse, eds. The Difference that Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields, pp 62-91. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

2018 “AFTERWORD: Diorama, Defamiliarization, Indigenous Presence.”  Special Issue of Visual Anthropology Review, “Faking It,” edited by Tess Lea and Jennifer Biddle. Volume 34, issue 1: 99-103.

2017 “Why Read Classics?”   SHORTCUTS:  Special section of Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol 7 (3):  8-12.2017   “Exhibiting Culture at the Boundary:  The Fetish of Early Papunya Boards.”  In L.Scholes, ed. Tjungungutja: From Having Come Together.  Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.  

2017    “Whose Story Is It? Complexities and Complicities of Using Archival Footage.”  In J. Anderson and H. Geismar, eds.  The Routledge Companion to Cultural Property.  Routledge Press.  Pp. 168-93.

2016    “Burning the Truck and Holding the Country: Pintupi Forms of Property and Identity.”  HAU – Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol 6, no. 1: 69-90.  Reprinted from 1989, Wilmsen, We Are Here.

2016    “Doubling.”  In Stephen Gilchrist, ed.  Everywhen:  The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia.  Yale University Press.  New Haven. Pp 52-59.

2016    “The Origins and History of Outstations as Aboriginal Life Projects.”  In N. Peterson and F. Myers, eds.  Experiments in Self-Determination:  Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia.  ANU Press.  Canberra.  Pp 1-22.

2016    “History, Memory and the Politics of Self-Determination in an Early Outstation”. In N. Peterson and F. Myers, eds. Experiments in Self-Determination:  Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia.  ANU Press.  Canberra. Pp. 81-103.

2015    “Cultural Anthropology, 1992-1996.” Cultural Anthropology 30, 2:

2015    “Paintings, Publics and Protocols: the Early Paintings from Papunya.” Material Culture Review/ Revue de la Culture Materielle., vol. 79, Spring: 78-91. .

------- and Luke Scholes
2015.   “Powerful Presence: Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri in Presence and in Paint.” In H. Skerritt, ed. No Boundaries: Contemporary Aboriginal Abstract Art from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection. Nevada Museum of Art. Pp 132-145. Prestel Publishing.

2014    “Showing Too Much or Too Little:  Predicaments of Painting Indigenous Presence in Central Australia.”  In Glenn Penny and Laura Graham, eds.  Performing Indigeneity.  University of Nebraska Press. Pp. 351-389.

2013    “ Disturbances in the Field:  Exhibiting Aboriginal Art in the US.”  Special Issue,  Journal of Sociology.  vol. 43 (2-3): 151-172
 
2013    “ Emplacement and Displacement:  Perceiving the Landscape through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting.” Ethnos 78, 4: 
 
2012    “Censorship from Below: Aboriginal Art in Australian Museums.  In T. Berman, ed. No Deal:  Indigenous Arts and The Politics of Possession.  Santa Fe:  School of Advanced Research.  

2011    “ Translating Indigenous Protocol.” In P. Batty and J. Ryan, eds.  Tjukurrtjanu.  National Gallery of Victoria.  Pp. ix-xi.

2011    “Intrigue of the Archive, Enigma of the Object.”  In P. Batty and J. Ryan, eds.  Tjukurrtjanu.  National Gallery of Victoria.  Pp 29-42.

2011    “ Fathers and Sons, Trajectories of the Self:  Reflections on Pintupi Lives and Futures."  In Ute Eickelkamp and Pauline Fietz, eds. Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence. Berghahn Books, Oxford.  Pp  82-100.

2010    “What Did Paintings Want? – Pintupi Painting at Yayayi in the 1970s.”  In Kasper Konig, W. Falk and E. Evans, ed.  Remember Forward.  Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Pp. 136-145.

2010     “ All Around Australia and Overseas:  Christianity and Indigenous Identities in Central Australia 1988."  For Special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology, edited by F. Dussart and C. Schwarz, In Dialogue with Christianities. Volume 21: 110-128.

2009     “The Power of Papunya Painting.”  Aboriginal Art Magazine, volume 1, no. 1: 40-45.

2009     “Graceful Transfigurations of Person, Place and Story: The Stylistic Evolution of Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi.”  In Roger Benjamin, ed.  Icons of the Desert.  Ithaca:  Cornell University Press.  Pp.  51-64.  

2008     Comment on Michael Brown, “Cultural Relativism 2.0,” Current Anthropology vol 49: 376-377.

2007     “A Day in the Life:  Painting at Yayayi 1974”. In Vivien Johnson, ed.  Papunya Painting; Out of the Desert. Canberra:  National Museum of Australia.  5 pages.

------- in collaboration with Jeremy Long
2007   “In Recognition:  The Gift of Painting.”  In Hetti Perkins, ed. One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia.  Sydney:  Art Gallery of New South Wales.  Pp. 171-180.

2006     " The Complicity of Cultural Production:  The Contingencies of Performance in Globalizing Museum Practices." In Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz, eds.  Museum Frictions.  Duke University Press.  Pp 505-536. 2006.
 
2006    “ We Are Not Alone: Anthropology in a World of Others.”  Invited essay, Key Informants in the History of Anthropology.  Ethnos 71 (2): 233-264.

------- and Faye Ginsburg
2006    “ A History of Aboriginal Futures.” Critique of Anthropology. 26 (1):  27-45.  

2006    “ ’Primitivism,’ Anthropology and the Category of ‘Primitive Art’.”  In Handbook of Material Culture.  Chris Tilley, Susanne Kuechler, Michael Rowlands, Webb Keane and Patricia Spyer, eds. Sage Press.  Pp 267-284,

2006    “ Collecting Aboriginal Art in the Australian Nation-state:  Two Case Studies.” Visual Anthropology Review, Vol 21, 1 and 2:  116-137.

2004    “ Ontologies Of The Image And Economies Of Exchange.” American Ethnologist, February, volume 31 (1):  1-16.

2000    “Ways of Placemaking.” In Howard Morphy and Katherine Flynt, eds.  Culture, Landscape, and the Environment.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.  Pps. 72-110.


1999    " Aesthetics and Practice: A Local Art History of Pintupi Painting." In H. Morphy and M. Boles, eds. The Art of Place: Dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

1994    " Culture-Making:  Performing Aboriginality in the Asia Society Gallery." American Ethnologist 21(4) 679-699.

1991    "Representing Culture:  The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings."  Cultural Anthropology, 6 (1):26-62.  (reprinted in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, G. Marcus, ed. Durham:  Duke University Press. 1992 and in The Traffic in Culture, Marcus and Myers, eds)


1988    " Locating Ethnographic Practice: Romance, Reality, and Politics in the Outback." American Ethnologist, 15: 609-24. 1988.


1988    “Burning the Truck and Holding the Country: Forms of Property, Time, and the Negotiation of Identity among Pintupi Aborigines." In T. Ingold, D. Riches, and J. Woodburn (eds), Hunter- Gatherers, II: Property, Power and Ideology. London: Berg Publishing. (longer version [ In] E. Wilmsen, ed., We Are Here. Berkeley: University of California Press.) 1988.


1986    "Reflections on a meeting: Structure, language, and the polity in a small-scale society," American Ethnologist, 13: 431-447.  

1985    "Illusion and Reality:  Aboriginal Self-Determination in Central Australia."  In C. Schrire and R. Gordon, eds., The Future of Former Foragers.  Cambridge:  Cultural Survival. pp 109-121

------ and Donald Brenneis
1984    "Introduction:  Language and Politics in the Pacific."  In D. Brenneis and F. Myers, eds., Dangerous Words.

1982    " Always Ask:  Resource Use and Landownership among the Pintupi of Central Australia."  In N. Williams and E. Hunn, eds., Resource Managers:  North American and Australian Hunter-Gatherers. Boulder:  Westview Press.  (republished by Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. 1986)

1982    "Ideology and Experience:  the Cultural Basis of Pintupi Politics."  In M. Howard, ed., Aboriginal Power in Australian Society).  Brisbane:  University of Queensland Press.  Pp. 108-52.

1979    " Emotions and the Self:  A Theory of Personhood and Political Order among the Pintupi," Ethos, 7: 343-70.

Updated August 2023

In the last few years, I have been able to participate in the development of an exhibition and catalog with the Kluge Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at University of Virginia celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Papunya Tula Artists, the Indigenous-owned arts cooperative with whom I have been working for many years. The painters of Papunya Tula were many of the same people with whom I was doing research in Central Australia throughout the 1970s and 80s, and I had documented most of the paintings produced in my different periods of research for the cooperative’s records.  

The exhibition, which has two parts, is entitled Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu (Past and Present Together):  50 Years of Papunya Tula Artists.  Part 1, follows the years 1971-1995, from the first experimentations through to the more abstract paintings known in the world today, inspired by the ancestral landscape, and telling a story of constant artistic rejuvenation.  Part 2 follows work from the years 1996-2021, the contemporary dynamics of the movement inspired by the work of women painters. After opening during the pandemic at Kluge Ruhe, the exhibition is now about to open again at the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC, in mid-October. We anticipate a panel on October 18, 2023, including painters from Papunya Tula, my co-editor and curator Henry Skerritt, scholar John Kean and others. The catalog is already in print, and I have to say that thanks to Henry’s brilliant work, it is superb. An online version of the exhibition is available -- https://papunyatula.kluge-ruhe.org/ -- and offers an excellent research tool in its own right.

 

This cooperative, “The Company,” was the originating location in the development of acrylic painting by Aboriginal people that expanded across the Western Desert and has received world-wide fame. The exhibition was planned by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, at the University of Virginia, the largest collection of Aboriginal art in the US. It is directed by Margo Smith, an old friend and colleague, and the anniversary project was under the curatorial guidance of Henry Skerritt.  They had gained the grant support to carry out the exhibition and catalog before inviting me to join.  Despite Papunya Tula’s historical and current importance, there has been no significant exhibition for this anniversary in the major state galleries in Australia, so the Kluge-Ruhe project is especially significant and has developed the exhibition in partnership with Papunya Tula Artists. Additionally, the Kluge-Ruhe team funded our colleague John Kean to travel to the communities in Central Australia to consult with descendants of the painters for their agreement or dissent from exhibiting various of the works. John’s trip to the Centre, which we followed on Facebook and email, made the exhibition something still in contact with the living presence of the Indigenous communities, the significance of country and kin in their lives, and for me – a connection back to people who have been so important to my own life.

The website for the exhibition is up, at Irrititja  Kuwarri Tjungu .  Probably will be modified soon and updated.

It has been a joyous experience to work on this, going back through and correcting the documentation of some of the paintings held by the collection, rethinking the subject matter of the paintings as well as the trajectories of style and representation.  I am co-editing the catalog, which will be 200+ pages with several fabulous essays by people closely involved with the development and exhibition of Papunya Tula art. This has included John Kean, art advisor to Papunya Tula in late 1970s and recently completed brilliant PhD on the early work, Hetti Perkins, the Arrernte and Kalkadoon long-time advocate and curator who created the major retrospective of Papunya Tula in 2000 (Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Cara Pinchbeck, the Kamilaroi current curator of the Aboriginal art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Marina Strocchi, the artist who led the workshops in the 1990s in which many of the women who have become artists for Papunya Tula developed their work, Paul Sweeney, the current (and long-time) manager of Papunya Tula, Henry Skerritt, art historian and curator at Kluge-Ruhe, myself, and Steve Martin, the important collector of contemporary art who has become a great supporter.  We have tried to draw attention to the many accomplishments of the arts cooperative, well beyond the remarkable achievement of artistic recognition, but with great attention to the visual forms of the works. The arts cooperative has been a vehicle of Indigenous self-determination, led by the Pintupi people with whom I had first worked.  Facing the epidemic of kidney disease, Pintupi have used the arts cooperative to realize many local goals, often against the inclinations of the state’s bureaucracy.  Most important and extraordinary has been the creation of an Indigenous-owned and run health service to deliver dialysis in culturally appropriate ways. The initial funding of this project came from an auction accompanying the exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, that sold four collaborative paintings from the two Pintupi communities, of Kintore (Walungurru) and Kiwirrkura, two by men and two by women.  The service, known as Purple House ( Purple House Story) now operates 18 remote clinics and a mobile dialysis unit called the Purple Truck, that allows for kidney patients to be on-country, in contact with their communities and able to pass on their knowledge to the younger generations.

 

The art cooperative also led the building of other health-related supports such as a swimming pool, using the proceeds of the art cooperative but also organizing public events to gain support, financial and moral for local projects. The catalog takes this broader view of the activities of making paintings to circulate Indigenous knowledge and attachment to country in the larger world.  In these ways, the paintings, objects that articulate the most vital elements of Indigenous cultural value embedded in the ancestral landscape, continue to produce and sustain life and meaning.  These paintings, their art, offered to the world, have provided a point of exchange, of connection between those who made them and others far beyond their communities.  As they told me long ago, the paintings are more than just some pretty pictures.  “Art” has long served such connection for Indigenous Australians.  In the exhibition, we are in some ways merely the emissaries of this work. And personally, through these works, I am continually being brought back into my relationships. An example?  Another exhibition, in Darwin 2017, of the Museum and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory’s collection of early Papunya paintings. I had an email from the advisor of a related art centre, Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) which served many people I had known in the Papunya area of the 1970s.  Would I open the show at a private gallery for Eunice Jack?  Who was she, I was wondering.  I was reminded that she was the daughter of Tutuma Jack, an elder in the 1970s who I knew well and she remembered me from then as her father’s friend. Eunice, now in her 80s, had come to paint her memories of being taken around her father’s country as a small girl, before contact with whites.  Her paintings are brilliantly resonant of the country, of a place known as Kuruyultu.  For Eunice, who I address as my “elder sister” (kangkuru), painting is the medium of her memory and recalling a past into the present.  And for the current generations in the communities of Walungurru, Kiwirrkura, and Papunya, these paintings and their exhibition carry these pasts into the present.

Painting is a medium for the expression of relationships, of memory, of sadness and of joy, and also of one’s relationship to the country.  Eunice’s new paintings were spurred by a visit from the curator of the Darwin exhibition when he was researching the works he would use, and he showed her a photo of her father and one of his paintings. Seeing that photo had such an impact on Eunice, taking her back to memories of her father carrying her around his country, and her paintings were transformed in style and intensity.  Some of this is what we hope the exhibition will help viewers see and understand.

I hope to be able to use the resources of this exhibition and my own relationship to it as part of my teaching in the Core Curriculum this year, Cultures and Contexts: Indigenous Australia.  

And recently had a podcast for the series Conversations in Anthropology, with Jason Gibson and Cameo Dalley, in Australia.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1UQmsi4Cbzlol0nag1LQx3?si=CEf5BiJXTXa9DxYLgVcEdw&dl_branch=1