Background
Kitty Pultara was born on Napperby Station, east of Yuendumu and north-west of Alice Springs in Australia"s Northern Territory, around 1925 or on 1 June 1938: the two main reference works give alternative dates.
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Kitty Napaljarri
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Career
Born at Napperby Station east of Yuendumu, Northern Territory, she worked on the station and first learned to paint there around 1986. Her work is held in the collections of the and Johnson"s 1994 biographical dictionary suggests that she may have been born as early as 1925, while Birnberg"s 2004 biographical dictionary gives 1 June 1938.
The ambiguity around the year of birth may be in part because Indigenous Australians operate using a different conception of time, often estimating dates through comparisons with the occurrence of other events.
"Napaljarri" (in Warlpiri) or "Napaltjarri" (in Western Desert dialects) is a skin name, one of sixteen used to denote the subsections or subgroups in the kinship system of central Australian Indigenous people. These names define kinship relationships that influence preferred marriage partners and may be associated with particular totems.
Although they may be used as terms of address, they are not surnames in the sense used by Europeans. Thus "Kitty Pultara" is the element of the artist"s name that is specifically hers.
Kitty"s close relatives include Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri.
Kitty Pultara worked on Napperby Station as a domestic. Background Their work, which used acrylic paints to create designs representing body painting and ground sculptures, rapidly spread across Indigenous communities of central Australia, particularly following the commencement of a government-sanctioned art program in central Australia in 1983. By the 1980s and 1990s, such work was being exhibited internationally.
The first artists, including all of the founders of the Papunya Tula artists" company, had been men, and there was resistance amongst the Pintupi men of central Australia to women painting.
However, there was also a desire amongst many of the women to participate, and in the 1990s large numbers of them began to create paintings. In the western desert communities such as Kintore, Yuendumu, Balgo, and on the outstations, people were beginning to create art works expressly for exhibition and sale.
Kitty Pultara took up painting in approximately 1986. Napperby Station was one of the first places where modern painting techniques were adopted by Indigenous artists: the movement commenced there in the mid 1980s, about the same time as at Yuendumu, where women began painting in 1983, and men in 1984.
Kitty"s work is represented in the collections of the, and the.
