On the Road with Paddy Nelson Jupurrula
Reproduced with permission of Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Association, Yuendumu, Central Australia and AIATSIS, Canberra.
Lecture M. Victor Leventritt Lecture
Harvard Art Museums32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
In the course of ethnographic fieldwork in central Australia in the 1990s, Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, got to know Paddy Nelson Jupurrula, one of the pre-eminent Warlpiri artists of the Western Desert painting movement. Professor Jackson will share some of Jupurrula’s insights into a worldview that emphasizes metamorphic processes, phases, or passages rather than contrasting conditions, such as being and nothingness, life and death, presence and absence, subject and object. In describing and depicting the transformations through which all things pass, Warlpiri artists invoke gestation and birth, sexual intercourse, digestion and defecation, sleeping and waking, fullness and emptiness as basic ontological metaphors.
Free admission
The lecture will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.
Following the lecture, the Everywhen exhibition will remain open until 8pm.
Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.
Cosponsored by Harvard Divinity School.
This lecture is presented in conjunction with Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, on view at the Harvard Art Museums from February 5 through September 18, 2016.
Support for the lecture is provided by the M. Victor Leventritt Fund, which was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and Greater Boston communities. Support for this program is also provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.
Lead support for Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia and related research has been provided by the Harvard Committee on Australian Studies. The exhibition is supported by the Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Consulate-General, New York.