Pitcha Makin Fellas: A long time coming, not done yet

The first career survey exhibition of First Nations collective the Pitcha Makin Fellas celebrates their legacy of humour, resistance, community connection and care.

Spring at MUMA will feature a survey exhibition celebrating the First Nations collective the Pitcha Makin Fellas, based on Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung land (Ballarat). An evolving collective, the Pitcha Makin Fellas began collaborating in 2013 meeting weekly to yarn and paint. They have become known for their unique cultural storytelling and tongue-in-cheek humour, and use their collective voice to speak up and speak back to incidents of racism, discrimination and the ongoing impacts of colonialism on First Nations people.

The exhibition will introduce audiences to their distinctive ways of working and features new and existing works by the collective spanning brightly coloured paintings, hand-painted breastplates and installation using their signature stamps. A major new commission, made for the exhibition, explores the activism that led to the Treaty with First Nations People in the state of Victoria in 2025. Also reflecting the Pitcha Makin Fellas long-time commitment to addressing the issues that affect their communities is their major triptych, in the Monash University Collection, Why Don’t Whitefellas Like Trees? 2022. The work is an act of resistance that calls out the ongoing impact of colonisation against Aboriginal land, culture, and sovereignty and is inspired by the Djab Wurrung campaign to stop the destruction of sacred trees for road-widening works near Ararat, Victoria.

A new publication will accompany the exhibition, taking inspiration from a stamp album, reflecting on the collective’s use of hand-carved stamps as tools of communication and offering a distinctive encounter with the Fellas’ world – one shaped by humour, resistance and care.

The exhibition builds on the Pitcha Makin Fellas long-term collaborations with MUMA including student engagement programs with the Melbourne Indigenous Transition School (MITS) 2022, inclusion in the exhibition Collective Movements presented at MUMA, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Castlemaine Art Museum, and Mildura Arts Centre, 2022-2024, and Learning with the Land: Learning with Respect 2022-2026, an international arts-based educational research project celebrating and centring First Nations perspectives.

^{Image: Pitcha Makin Fellas, Blackmanland The Fellas Coat of Arms, 2014}