Tjulyuru Regional Art Gallery

After three decades the Warburton Collection (now with around 900 paintings and numerous other works) in art-glass, textile is supported by its database all located in the community on traditional country, is a unique Indigenous cultural asset in Australia.

Since it began in 1989, it has worked continuously to establish new creative options and solutions for Ngaanyatjarra people in endless different ways. At the community level, these are small, provisional acts of humanity cultural action – a painting program, an art-glass program, a rock art program, heritage “back to country” projects – but all bring about in various ways an ongoing social narrative of reflexive human re-constructions, strategic moments of personal re-identification within lived culturally charged spaces.

It is the accumulation of these human, cultural and social narratives that is magic by which societies and communities may live, and in this wider sense the Warburton Collection, exposed at the Tjulyuru regional Art Gallery, is not so much one of “art” as it is of human energy.