APY Gallery International Program

“Before you paint, you need to sing. The songs tell the tjukurpa and from the songs come the paintings.” STEVEN ALDERTON

Steven works closely with the APY Art Centre Collective as the Director of the International Program at APY Gallery. The APY Art Centre Collective is an Aṉangu-owned organisation that unites 7 art centres across the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, 102,000km2 of desert country in the far northwest of South Australia, land returned to Aṉangu traditional owners in 1981 and held collectively by the 2,000 people living across its communities and homelands.

The art centre at Pukatja opened in 1948 and has run continuously since, the oldest in the country, and the movement that began there now supports more than 500 artists working in painting, ceramics, sculpture, weaving and printmaking.

The collective is 100% Indigenous owned and governed and returns the maximum share of income to artists and their communities. Steven has visited communities on Country, sat with senior artists, and knows the studios, the painters, and the work in depth. That relationship, built over years, is what allows him to select the strongest work as it is made and place it where it matters.

The work coming out of these art centres is of international significance. Aṉangu painters hold their Country and their law on canvas at a scale and with an ambition that belongs in the major museums, and the senior artists are among the most consequential painters at work anywhere today. The International Program exists to put that work where it can be seen on those terms: at the leading art fairs, in the hands of the collectors and curators who set the international conversation, and in the permanent collections of museums and foundations abroad.

Steven is building lasting relationships between APY artists, Australian Aboriginal art and the international arts sector. That means artists and art centre managers travelling and speaking for their own work, curators and directors brought onto Country, sustained relationships with the institutions that collect and exhibit, and a standing in the international market that holds.