Deborah Barlow blogs about the variety of Australian Aboriginal painting on view in museum shows in 2012, including Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art, which continues through March 10, 2013.
Writing about Crossing Cultures and Ancestral Modern (recently on view at the Seattle Museum), Barlow notes that "many of the works in both of these shows are by artists who are second (and even third) generation, following on the path laid by those first pioneering elders 40 years ago. The lineage in the work is evident, but these younger painters are not caught in a derivative loop of tradition and style. The work feels fresh, exploratory and yet still elementally Aboriginal. I connect deeply with the old as well as the new."