International Art | Sculpture
Satyr with wineskin cast 19th century
after UNKNOWN ROMAN
Judy Watson
By Katina Davidson
June 2018
Judy Watson was born in 1959 at Mundubbera, in south-east Queensland, but the spirit of much of her work stems from the Waanyi homeland of her grandmother and great-grandmother in north-west Queensland.
Living in Sydney in the 1980s, Watson became associated with Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, established to promote the work of urban artists. She eventually joined the group, exhibiting in the seminal survey exhibition ‘A Koori Perspective’ at Artspace, Sydney in 1989.
Watson gained national prominence in 1995 when she became the second Indigenous artist to receive the Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship. (In 1991, it had been awarded to Gordon Bennett.) In 1997 her work was selected for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and in 2003 Watson was honoured with a solo retrospective exhibition by John Curtin Gallery (Curtin University of Technology, Perth), which toured nationally and internationally through Asialink. In 2006, she was awarded the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria, and in 2007 her work was exhibited in the inaugural National Indigenous Australian Triennial, ‘Culture Warriors’, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Judy Watson during an in-conversation in GOMA's Cinema A, September 2022 / Photograph: Brad Wagner, QAGOMA
Watson’s work is held in all major Australian public collections and internationally in the MCA / Tate Collections; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; St Louis Art Museum, Missouri, USA; The British Museum, London; the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK; Library of Congress, Washington, USA; and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia, USA. ‘blood language’, a monograph by Judy Watson and Louise Martin-Chew, was published by The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing in 2009.
Watson has received several major public art commissions nationally and internationally, including the Gallery’s Queensland Indigenous Artist Public Art Commission in 2016 (resulting in tow row 2016). Other selected commissions reside at the Melbourne Museum; Sydney International Airport; the Victorian County Court, Melbourne; Reconciliation Place, Canberra; and the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. In Brisbane, her work is featured in the Brisbane Magistrates Court; Gootcha, City Cat, Brisbane; Turbot Street Overpass; Queensland Institute of Medical Research; Townsville Hospital, Townsville; Flinders University, Adelaide; and 200 George Street, Sydney.
Biographical information updated by Katina Davidson, Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, June 2018.
WATSON, Judy
1959
- present
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