Professor Dodson and Indigenous art expert Brenda Croft at the unveiling of the artwork
The passing of Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett is a great loss to Australia’s contemporary art scene, but his legacy lives on at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).
AIATSIS Principal, Russell Taylor said he was deeply saddened by the news of Gordon’s passing
“It is a great loss and we at the Institute would like to express our deepest sympathies to the Bennett family and their friends,” Mr Taylor said.
“Mr Bennett’s family can take heart in the fact we hold and will preserve one of his major works so that future generations can enjoy the thought provoking piece.
“As the national custodian of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and heritage, the Institute is a natural home to one of Gordon Bennett’s extraordinary works and we are very proud to hold it for posterity.”
Bennett’s Notes to Basquiat: Subject Matters 2000, purchased by AIATSIS in 2002, takes pride of place in the Rom Gallery in the Institute’s main foyer. At close to two metres tall and over four metres long, the imposing piece was designed by Bennett to take on the appearance of a wall mural.
Much of Bennett’s work is concerned with identity stemming from his own struggle with identity as an Australian of Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic descent, his father an English migrant and his mother a Birri Gubba/Darambal woman.
In an open letter accompanying the piece addressed to New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bennett opens up about his identity struggles:
Brought up, educated and socialised as a ‘white’ Australian I became acutely aware of racist stereotypes and the power/knowledge relationship that governed the historical representations of Aborigines within contemporary Australian culture.
In the letter Bennett refers to the painting as ‘appropriation art’, where images and text are taken from the environment around the artist and reproduced in such a way to comment on the cultural landscape – a style famously used by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The artwork is one of over 1000 unique artifacts and artworks by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists held by the Institute.
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