The winners of the 33rd National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards have been announced.

Northern Territory artist Harold Joseph Thomas (Bundoo) has taken out the 2016 Telstra Art Award, the top prize at the 33rd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Art Award (NATSIAA). The award worth $50,000 was presented to him this evening at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in Darwin.

Thomas’s work Tribal abduction draws on his personal experience as a member of the Stolen Generations, having been taken from his family as a young child. The painting was selected as the overall winner in Australia’s most prestigious Indigenous art prize from more than 240 entries and 75 finalists. Five other artists were also presented with awards in various categories.

Best known for his design of the Aboriginal flag in 1971, Thomas is a talented watercolour artist whose primary subject is the landscape and wildlife of the Top End. He described his NATSIAA winning work as depicting the “part destruction of an Aboriginal family. It’s a setting in outback Australia emphasising the human form entwined to tell the story of pathos and drama, especially for the abduction of children from their tribal family,” he said.

This year’s winning works were selected by a judging panel of three: Vernon Ah Kee, a respected contemporary artist; Kimberley Moulton, Senior Curator, South Eastern Australia Aboriginal Collections, Museum Victoria; and Don Whyte, an artist, philanthropist and valued contributor to the NT arts community.

The judges said that “the potency of the subject matter coupled with Thomas’s practiced hand and classical composition” made his work “a compelling choice this year. The tension and anger in the work is contrasted with the dread and fear often espoused in accounts of ‘stolen’ children. Particularly, this painting depicts the violence in the act. It also speaks to the legacy of generational trauma and this positions the work both as an affecting history painting and a blazing commentary on the ongoing manifestations of colonial brutality.”

Born in Alice Springs in 1947, Thomas now lives in Humpty Doo, a small NT town approximately 40 kilometres from Darwin. A descendant of the Luritja and Wambai peoples of Central Australia, he was taken from his family at age seven and sent to an Anglican institution for Aboriginal boys before being fostered by an Anglican priest and his family. In 1966, he won a scholarship to study at the South Australian School of Art, becoming the first Aboriginal to graduate from there in 1970. His debut exhibition of watercolours was opened by Don Dunstan, the then Premier of South Australia, in 1967. In 1971, Thomas designed the Aboriginal flag and became involved with the Aboriginal Civil Rights Movement. Thomas was selected in the inaugural National Aboriginal Art Award (now known as Telstra NATSIAA) in 1984, which has been run by MAGNT ever since, with Telstra as Principle Sponsor since 1992.

Five other 2016 NATSIAA awards, each worth $5000, were also presented. South Australian artist Betty Kuntiwa Pumani won the Telstra General Painting Award for her large-scale field painting. Robert Pau from Cairns won the Telstra Work on Paper Award for his densely detailed depiction of the Erub people fighting in the Battle of Bikar, with the judges praising its “cinematic composition”. The Telstra Bark Painting Award went to John Mawurndjul from Mumeka, NT, for the intricate line work in his bark painting Dilebang, which tells of the creation story of the sacred site of Djang by Ngalyod, the rainbow serpent.

Sydney artist Nicole Monks won the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award for her moving performance piece We are all animals, a deeply personal work about trying to negotiate a space as an Aboriginal woman caught between two worlds. The Telstra Youth Award went to Ishmael Marika from Nhulunbuy, NT for his film Sunlight energy II, which explores the way light influences the space around us.


The Telstra NATSIAA finalists will be exhibited at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory from August 6 to October 30

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