Residencies Unreflected in Papunya

This literature review takes up two books: Residencies Reflected (2024), a collection of essays on artist residencies, edited by Imeli Kokko; and Dot, Circle & Frame: The Making of Papunya Art (2023) by John Kean. The review will argue that Kean's revisionist account of the “invention” of contemporary Aboriginal art at Papunya in Central Australia in 1971, which gives much more agency to the artists involved than previously, demonstrates that Papunya was effectively an art colony and not an artist residency. Altogether it can be argued that the making of Aboriginal art at a number of locations around Australia in the 1970s reveals that art colonies live on in that country at exactly the time they are thought to die out around the rest of the world.