Background
Maggie Ross was born east of Yuendumu, Northern Territory around 1935 or 1940, and worked on Coniston Station, to the east of Yuendumu and north-west of Alice Springs.
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Maggie Ross
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Her work has been collected by and the Kluge-Ruhe Museum in the United States. The ambiguity around the year of birth is 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 "Maggie Ross" is the element of the artist"s name that is specifically hers.
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. In 1996 Maggie was one of the twenty-nine women and five men who collaborated to produce Karrku Jukurrpa, a work commissioned for the collection of John Kluge and exhibited in the at the University of Virginia.
The painting assembles a range of mythological symbols and stories associated with the people and country around Yuendumu.
As well as being a collaborator on group works held in the Kluge-Ruhe collection and the, Maggie Ross"s paintings are also held by.
