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Aboriginal Art’s Second Coming

After decades of well-meaning but market-dampening regulations, Australian Aboriginal artists like Emily Kam Kngwarray are finding their true value. It just so happens that we’re in the middle of an Indigenous art boomlet that may portend another frenzy of interest.

Emily Kam Kngwarray
Born in 1910, Kngwarray’s life experience tracks the Aboriginal peoples’ encounter with the modern world—and indeed, she died at the age of 86, in the same year that the authorities lifted restrictions on female painting. Photo: Courtesy of Toly Sawenko
Marion Maneker
August 15, 2025

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Aboriginal art is so fascinating, in part, because it evokes the expressive abstract painting of modernism. And yet, the essence of the work is ancient and remote: It is, after all, an expression of one of the world’s oldest continuous cultures, with an iconography that had been in use for tens of thousands of years before it found its way onto canvases in the waning days of the 20th century.