NEW YORK, NY.- NYU’s Grey Art Museum hosts the landmark traveling exhibition Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu: Contemporary Aboriginal Painting from the Australian Desert, the first U.S. survey of Australia’s most globally recognized Aboriginal art movement. For the past five decades, Papunya Tula Artists—the oldest Aboriginal-owned arts organization in Australia—has stood at the forefront of contemporary Aboriginal art, producing some of the most iconic art and artists in the nation’s history. Inspired by the sweeping ancestral landscape of the Australian desert, the exhibition celebrates one of the world’s greatest stories of resilience, self-determination, and the power of art.

On view from January 22 through April 11, 2026, at 18 Cooper Square, the exhibition features over 80 artists and some 120 works produced since 1971, including masterworks by leading artists such as Mantua Nangala, Makinti Napanangka, Yukultji Napangati, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, and Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula. Rather than reflecting a chronological sequence, works in the exhibition are arranged based on geographic and social ties. By juxtaposing multiple representations of the same (or related) subjects across multiple generations of artists, the exhibition surfaces key insights on the development of style, motif, and aesthetics across the past half-century and the life of the arts organization. The project significantly expands on the art historical terrain charted in the exhibition Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, which was organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and presented at the Grey Art Museum in fall 2009, and which featured some 50 paintings made in Papunya in the early 1970s. Both Icons of the Desert and Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu have benefited from the critical contributions of Dr. Fred Myers, and a renowned cultural anthropologist who has studied the practices of Papunya artists since the beginning of the region’s painting revolution.

Organized by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia in conjunction with Papunya Tula Artists, Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu—a Pintupi phrase meaning “past and present together”— is the result of a thirty-year association between the two organizations. Reflecting on the exhibition’s impact, Henry F. Skerritt, Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia and Curator of Research at Kluge-Ruhe, says, “The international success of Aboriginal art has been the single most effective tool in making mainstream Australians aware of the unbreakable ties between Aboriginal people and their land, along with the ancestral connections, or ‘Dreamings,’ that underpin this worldview.”

“The Grey Art Museum and NYU have an abiding history with this foundational movement—16 years ago, we presented Icons of the Desert in collaboration with Fred Myers, a longtime advisor to and friend of the Grey,” adds Michèle Wong, Interim Director. “This new, expansive survey allows us to showcase the remarkable evolution of Papunya Tula Artists, including the crucial contributions of its women artists, to a New York audience.”

A highlight of the exhibition is The Papunya Tula Fiftieth Anniversary Suite, featuring 50 works by 50 leading contemporary artists from the organization. The relatively small, nearly square canvases that compose this historic commission create an epic picture of collective knowledge and the power of community. Irriṯitja Kuwarri Tjungu also includes two well-known artworks exclusive to the Grey’s presentation: Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula’s Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa (1972) and Michael Jagamara Nelson’s Five Stories (1984). Michael Nelson’s Five Stories is one of the most reproduced Aboriginal artworks in existence, and has not been shown in New York since Asia Society’s 1988 exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. Although now iconic, at the time of its production, the work contained several pictorial innovations, including the use of yellow dotting to outline graphic elements—as opposed to the usual white dots—and a wide array of highly original infill techniques. These techniques bring together into a single, coherent image, five different ancestral narratives that intersect on the artist’s homelands. Johnny Warangkula’s Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa is part of the artist’s well-known series, Water Dreamings, inspired by the heavy rains in Papunya at the time. Using sinuous strokes and shimmering dotting, Johnny Warangkula captured the presence of abundant plant life following desert rains, cementing the dot as a defining feature of Aboriginal art more than any other artist. The painting’s historical significance is underscored by the fact that it twice made Australian national headlines when it sold for world-record auction prices in the 1990s and 2000s.