Makinti Napanangka

Makinti Napanangka

Makinti Napanangka was a Pintupi-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Australia’s Western Desert region. She began painting Contemporary Indigenous Australian art at Kintore in the mid-1990s. Her work was shown in the major indigenous art exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She died in Alice Springs in January 2011, and was referred to posthumously as Kumentje.

About Makinti Napanangka in brief

Summary Makinti NapanangkaMakinti Napanangka was a Pintupi-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Australia’s Western Desert region. She began painting Contemporary Indigenous Australian art at Kintore in the mid-1990s, encouraged by a community art project. Her paintings primarily take as their subjects a rockhole site, Lupul, and an indigenous story about two sisters, known as Kungka Kutjarra. Makinti won the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2008. Her work was shown in the major indigenous art exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She died in Alice Springs in January 2011, and was referred to posthumously as Kumentje. She was one of a large group of people who walked into Haasts Bluff in the early 1940s, together with her husband Nyukuti Tjupurrula, and their son Ginger Tjakamarra, born around 1940. Her children Ginger, Narrabri, and Jacqueline also became artists, all of them painting for Papunyas Tula Artists.

In 1992, the Ikuntji Centre was opened at Haast’s Bluff, and by 1997 her work was being acquired by major institutions. It was through this initiative that she joined a new generation of artists who were painting for the Minyma Tjukrpa Artists Cooperative. In the late 1980s, some of the main painters in the Papunyan movement were painting in the Haast Bluff area, but the deaths of some of them led to a decline in the main artists’ work. In 1994, the Minyrrpa Centre opened in Haast’s Bluff and the new artists joined the Ikunji Centre. In 1997, the artists’ collection was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia and by 2000, the work of several of the artists had been acquired by several major institutions, including the Sydney Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In 2000, she was a finalist in the 2003 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, and in 2003 she was awarded a National Aboriginal Art Award.