SHONAE HOBSON First Nations Curator, Bendigo Art Gallery
It’s not just big-city galleries that possess the knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curators – there is also a change occurring at a regional level. In 2018, Shonae Hobson, who is a Southern Kaantju woman from Coen, Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland, became Bendigo Art Gallery’s inaugural First Nations curator. Since her time at Bendigo, Hobson has curated a number of important shows, including Piinpi: Contemporary Indigenous Fashion, the first major survey of today’s Indigenous Australian fashion landscape.
“As a young curator working in a regional setting, it is important for me to build deep and meaningful relationships with community,” explains Hobson. “It is my mission to support and profile artists living and working in regional and remote locations through my work.”
In the image above, Hobson is interpreted by her mother, Naomi Hobson, an acclaimed photographer and painter of southern Kaantju and Umpila heritage from Lockhart River, Cape York Peninsula. Hobson’s painting, Pingan, is a representation of her daughter’s relationship to Country. The artwork identifies Shonae’s story; the native star flower is endemic to Cape York on Shonae’s homeland and the name Pingan was given to Shonae at birth by her grandmother to identify Shonae to her family and connect her to place.
One curator who went through this important NGA/Wesfarmers Arts program, and who is currently working as the acting curator of Indigenous Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), is Katina Davidson, who has links to Purga and Deebing Creek Missions and Kullilli and Yuggera people from Queensland as well as maternal non-Indigenous Australian heritage. Before becoming a curator, Davidson trained as an artist at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art (QCA), an important art school as it has a long-established history of being a place where art intersects with activism. Collectives such as proppaNOW – a Blak art collective founded in 2003, whose current members include Richard Bell, Jennifer Herd, Vernon Ah Kee, Gordon Hookey and Megan Cope, help affirm the important relationships between curators and the communities whose work they represent.
“I am so thankful for the generations of curators, artists and activists before me for creating the opportunities that allowed me to gain institutional experience,” says Davidson. “Access to their hive mind and being able to learn in real time from those at the forefront of critical Indigenous curatorial practices internationally has completely propelled my career forwards. In my work I want to continue this legacy of enabling access for our communities, artists and cultural practitioners – so that they may have mutually beneficial relationships with institutions, which is something that we haven’t always had. I see this as my inherited legacy and activism.”
This portrait of Katina Davidson is by contemporary mixed-media artist Hannah Brontë, who comes from Wakka Wakka and Yaegl heritage. Brontë’s work has roots in female empowerment, protest and popular music. Brontë’s portrait of Davidson is her way of showing the curator’s role as an arts activist and representing her as a “Blak superwoman tidda”.