Welcome to Volume 01

It is an almost surreal feeling to write this editorial for Volume 1 of Blue Art Journal. When we started leading Art Monthly Australasia in late 2023, we were primarily concerned with retiring it and shepherding in a new Indigenous art journal grounded in genuine and honest criticism. It has been a difficult transition: the job of the Board of Directors has been demanding, and in most cases, it has been all-consuming.

Blue Art Journal is Australia’s first publication dedicated to critical and experimental arts writing about local Indigenous and global First Nations art. The journal’s title, which we devised, draws attention to the sky and water, both of which are expansive ancestral bodies of importance that unites all First Nations peoples. The colour blue was also selected to speak to colour theory, colour development, colour classification metrics, and colour accessibility. After all, it is the colour blue that has, throughout history, proven the most elusive and the most highly valued (much like how Indigenous artists have resisted western definition whilst rising as some of the art world’s most coveted creators).

Equally as important as the marker of the colour blue has been the Board’s desire to create a new platform that would be committed to elevating global Indigenous ways of knowing and being. We embrace local and global Indigenous voices, experiences and perspectives, actively addressing barriers that have prevented Indigenous peoples from participating in critical visual arts writing. This priority of wanting to grow audiences and communities, spanning across waters and great seas, has established Blue Art Journal’s online resting place, accessible to all, reaching out towards the corners of lands where our kin and allies reside.

Over the last thirty years (at least), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art has gained recognition and momentum as a distinctive practice within the global art scene, offering an important platform for our stories. However, there remains considerable work to be done in recognising and understanding the full range of our practices here in so-called Australia. Our art and craft benefit from unique frameworks that express our sovereignty, land, kinship systems, and cosmogonies. These frameworks reveal who we are, where we come from, what we believe in, and the changes we have endured since colonisation. Indigenous sovereignty goes beyond local boundaries, serving as a political and ethical statement worldwide, and our cultural institutions are increasingly taking the time to learn how to interpret and meaningfully frame our ways of being.

As the global art scene evolves, our contemporary practices are gradually being understood on our own terms, rather than through the ethnographic and anthropological frameworks that once confined/defined us. Increased recognition has led to greater engagement with the knowledge, identity, and storytelling that Indigeneity provides. To us, these frameworks make recognising our stories straightforward because they come from lived relationships to Country, ancestors, and community – relationships maintained through protocols, language, and law. And to those outside our lands appreciating our art from afar, these same frameworks can seem much more complex, not because they are inherently inaccessible, but because they depend on ways of knowing that western art history has historically overlooked, dismissed, or been ill-equipped to understand. Perhaps a simpler way to promote understanding is for global audiences to begin their journeys of recognition by simply considering that they have their own journey of reconciliation to undertake with the Indigenous peoples whose lands they live, work, or play on.

Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples continue to build relationships across continents, creating spaces where our stories and practices can sit side by side, thrive, and support our missions. These different journeys shape how our work is understood beyond our borders. Our connections go well beyond the imagined cartographic boundary zones that have been imposed on our peoples. Throughout the world, Indigenous peoples continue to build on a history of solidarity with each other by recognising our shared struggles against colonial systems, but most importantly our shared celebrations of survival, resurgence, and cultural continuity. These relationships – grounded in respect, responsibility, and cultural exchange – strengthen our collective global community, and create transnational networks through which we can honour each other’s knowledge, art practices, and sovereignty.

As a First Nations-led initiative, Blue Art Journal ensures that our stories, art and cultural practices are presented true to the vision and values of Indigenous communities. We guard against the misrepresentation and appropriation of First Nations culture and provide a platform through which Indigenous visual arts, craft and design can be shared with communities and recorded for future generations. Blue Art Journal will never be a vehicle for cancel culture. Blue Art Journal’s objective is to build a stronger practice of critique amongst Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) artists across the Arts to better focus on the contemporary Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Global Indigenous experience. This includes commissioning critical reviews for both independent and commercial First Nations exhibitions that may close between our publishing schedule; it is more important that we establish First Nations-reviewed literature for our artists than to only give space to shows that are ‘live’. To us, art and its affects need to be written about and recognised beyond the life of an exhibition, understanding that artworks continue to have a life even after they are removed from gallery walls.

To celebrate Blue Art Journal’s first Volume, we focus our inaugural commissions on charting the rise of the Global Indigenous. To us, this is the international art world’s focused interest on Indigenous art, particularly evident in the model of biennials and triennials worldwide, along with the globalisation of Aboriginal art abroad. We invited writers who have been at the forefront of this rise to contribute their critical thoughts: Clothilde Bullen, a Wardandi and Badimaya curator argues for the value of Blak arts criticism in Australia while Gerald McMaster, Plains Cree from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation, charts this rise through his curatorial projects in Canada and abroad over the last 30 years.

Non-traditional ‘critical’ ways of writing about or documenting art practices have been built into the foundational fabric of Blue Art Journal. D Harding, this Volume’s cover artist of Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal descent, weaves their words through imagery to form the foundational story of their current project Places, grounding our readers wholly within Wiradjuri Country and community. Yankunytjatjara and Western Arrernte artist Robert Fielding has contributed a visual essay, documenting the Wati Project he has established in Mimili. Known for his poetics, Robert’s text is rich in storytelling and a powerful call for what’s next.

Alice Skye, a Wergaia and Wemba Wemba singer-songwriter, has written a piece of poetry that explores identity through the ways we worship. Winnie Dunn, this country’s first published Tongan-Australian writer, has contributed a new short story about becoming and belonging in Western Sydney; and Yorta Yorta curator Belinda Briggs has contributed a piece of poetry titled Murrangurrang, meaning ‘Always’.

Leitu Bonnici, a Samoan and mixed European artist and designer, and Jocelyn Flynn, a Notsi, Papua Nuiguinian curator, answered our call for pitches. Leitu’s text considers Indigenous autonomy within the field and history of type design while Jocelyn provides readers with a timely review of the National Gallery of Australia’s Bilong Papua New Guinea exhibition, staged for the nation’s 50th anniversary of independence from Australia.

Further reviews include D Harding’s Places at Murray Art Museum Albury by critic Tristen Harwood (Ngalkan); Eastern Arrernte curator Shanysa McConville’s review of Charles Jangala Inkamala’s Lines of Country – West Hermannsburg to Papunya at Vivien Anderson Gallery. Together, these works represent the vision of Blue Art Journal: emerging, established, critical, creative and community voices are at the heart, and the charters of, the continued rise of the Global Indigenous.