Nyapanyapa Yunupingu

Yunupingu is a Yolngu woman of the Gumatj clan who was born in Arnhem Land in about 1945.[1] She is the daughter of Indigenous artist and cultural leader Munggurrawuy Yunupingu (c.1905–1979) who taught her to paint.[2]

Widowed, she was a wife of the late Djapu clan leader Djiriny Mununggurr who died in 1977. She is the sister of Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Mandawuy Yunupingu, Gulumbu Yunupingu and Barrupu Yunupingu.[2]

Nyapanyapa Yunupingu works through the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre at Yirrkala.

She had her first solo exhibition of bark paintings in 2008 in Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. Her work has been exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney in 2012 and 2016.[3]

In 2008, Yunupingu won the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Prize in Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards with a piece that combined painting on eucalyptus bark with video to narrate a biographic event with in which she was gorged by a buffalo in 1975. Her paintings of being gored by a buffalo were the inspiration and backdrop for Nyapanyapa, a dance choreographed by Stephen Page for Bangarra Dance Theatre which toured the United States.[4]

In 2017, her abstract painting Lines was awarded the bark painting prize at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. The work was subsequently acquired by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), in Darwin.[5]

She was selected as one of the featured artists for the 2020 Australia-wide #KnowMyName initiative of the National Gallery of Australia.[6]

Starting on 23 May 2020 (later than scheduled owing to the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia) and due to run until 25 October 2020,[7] a comprehensive solo exhibition of Yunupingu's work, the moment eternal: Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu was mounted at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. The exhibition features more than 60 works, and it is the first solo exhibition at MAGNT to feature work by an Aboriginal Australian artist.[8] A catalogue to accompany the exhibition was published.[9]

• Art Gallery of New South Wales[1]
• Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia
• National Gallery of Australia[10]
• National Gallery of Victoria[11]
• Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art[12]

• 2012-13: UnDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT; Cairns Regional Gallery, Cairns QLD; Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, at the University of South Australia, Adelaide SA; and the Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, NSW.[13]
• 2012: Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.[14][15]
• 2014: The World is Not a Foreign Land. Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC.[16][17]
• 2016-2019: Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia. Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, FL; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.[18][19]