Groote Eylandt Art: Leonhard Adam Ethnological Collection

About the exhibition
Dr Leonhard Adam built an extensive ethnological collection between 1942 and 1957, while he was a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. Adam intended his collection to be a teaching resource for the benefit of anthropology and art history students, and he gifted it to the University of Melbourne in 1960. The collection included a detailed and specialist selection of bark paintings collected at Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1945, exhibited for the first time at the University Art Gallery, University of Melbourne, in 1973. Grazia Gunn had been an Assistant Curator at the University of Melbourne in 1972–74, where she was responsible for the Leonhard Adam Ethnological Collection, developing the 1973 exhibition and accompanying publication which catalogued each item. The selection of works loaned from the University of Melbourne for this 1979 exhibition at Monash seems to have been programmed to present a comparison or a companion to the Aboriginal Arts Board exhibition, Oenpelli Bark Paintings, which immediately followed it—indicative of the Western interest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art practices burgeoning at this time.

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
MUMA’s online archive is expanding. We welcome your feedback and input. Please contact muma.communications@monash.edu with any information that could help enrich the archive for future audiences.

^{Image: Bark Painting No. 29 and Bark Painting No. 30, Groote Eylandt (years unknown)}