“The Stars We Do Not See” is an ambitious and historical traveling exhibition making a stop at the Denver Art Museum through July 26. Billed as the largest assemblage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art ever presented in North America, it features many paintings and three-dimensional works that have never before traveled outside of Australia.
For art fans in Denver who have probably not been immersed in this colorful art, the show serves as a sort of engaging, summer staycation opportunity, a journey through unfamiliar lands that happens to be right down the street.
Itap a large undertaking, featuring 130 objects by 142 artists, including drawings, map paintings, works on bark and trees, textiles and more contemporary materials such as photography and neon. And it has major gallery cred, since it was organized by both the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it premiered last year.
That debut got a mixed reception. The show attempts to accomplish a lot — summing up decades of complicated art history in a display that can be consumed in about an hour — and there is an inevitable disappointment in that, especially for fans of the deep, academic dive. This exhibition is a survey, not a college course.
But as an intro to a genre of art that rarely gets the spotlight here, I found it satisfying, even exciting at times, offering lessons in geography, culture and painting, all told through a mesmerizing collection of work.
The exhibition does have what I assume will be a high learning curve for many visitors, starting with understanding the artists themselves and where they come from. For that, it’s best to begin with information that the National Gallery published at the outset to accompany the offering.
“Aboriginal peoples have ancestral roots on what is today known as mainland Australia and in Tasmania,” according to that text. “Torres Strait Islanders trace their roots to the archipelago of islands off the northeast coast of Australia, and the bottom of Papua New Guinea.”
Before the British colonized those regions in the late 1700s, there were “more than 600 Indigenous nations, representing more than 250 language groups and over 500 dialects.”
“The Stars We Do Not See” attempts to show how history and the diverse background of these Indigenous people evolved into the contemporary art they make today, focusing mostly from the 1980s to the present. As you can imagine, a lot of influences impact the way the work appears. That includes old methods of drawing, writing, mapmaking and the recording of history, as well as more recent influences, such as the development of global communications, the evolution of the contemporary art market, and the widespread reckoning over colonialism and its impacts on vast civilizations. Like I said, itap an ambitious show.
But the exhibition’s organizers make sense of things through the work itself and the common methods artists have adapted over time. Running throughout the exhibition are styles of mark making dominated by geometric shapes, lines made from the repetition of individual dots, and brilliantly hued blocks of color that come together as abstract landscapes, skyscapes and other pictorial concepts.
The work is often intricate and labor-intensive, and sometimes on grand scale. One piece in the show, “Ngayartu Kujarra,” a 2009 painting depicting a spiritually significant lake in Western Australia, has 12 collaborators listed in the wall text.
The show calls out the stars of the genre, including Emily Kam Kngwarray and Gulumbu Yunupinu, and is broken down into sections that help visitors understand timelines and key places of progress, and it ends with a series of very recent works that delve more into the politics of displacement. Showstoppers include a series of paintings on eucalyptus bark and groupings of decorated tree trunks, known as memorial poles.
While many of the art-making techniques can be traced back centuries, the show makes a distinction between the work in “The Stars We Do Not See” and artifacts from earlier periods. The objects on display are, by and large, purposefully made as artwork and not ceremonial or functional in nature.
For example, visitors learn that the bark paintings came about in the 1900s when a British Australian biologist asked Aboriginal artists to replicate their ancestral style of paintings — traditionally applied to cave walls, shelters and ceremonial objects — on individual pieces of bark that were roughly the same size as canvases that European artists were using for oil paintings.
“These early paintings became a catalyst for reimagining traditional stories and imagery as contemporary art,” the exhibition text explains.
Similarly, the memorial poles have their roots in preserving the stories of deceased humans, though many of the poles made today, which are included in this show, are simply art for artap sake.
But the connection between old techniques and modern sensibilities is the exhibitap magic — especially for audiences new to the work. Things often feel older than they are because they have what might seem to be a “primitive” quality to them. But their dates give them away as new objects made with present-day sensibilities while retaining a respect for the past.
In that way, “The Stars We Do Not See” has multiple entry points for visitors. The works are visually pleasing, hyper-colorful art objects, but they are also puzzles to solve, maps to read, a world waiting to be explored.
IF YOU GO
“The Stars We Do Not See” continues through July 26 at the Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Ave. Info: 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.
