The Brooklyn Rail

Reggie Uluru—senior Traditional Owner of Uluru, ceremony songman of the Anangu, elder of the Mutitjulu community, and resident artist at Walkatjara Art Uluru—paints an ancestral dream: the Tjukurpa of Wati Ngintaka tells the story of the creation of Australia, when the Perentie Lizard Man and other Tjukuritja beings roamed the desert forming the land and planting the seeds of the First Nations cultures. In each of Uluru’s paintings the artist invokes this story, convening these characters within frenetic canvases of dusty earthen tones to solidify a song he’s danced for his entire life.

I walked into D’Lan Contemporary’s Upper East Side gallery to find Reggie Uluru waving from the corner; it’s early morning in Central Australia, and the eighty-five-year-old artist was Zooming in to attend his first international solo exhibition from a Mac desktop. Sixteen of Uluru’s paintings lined the perimeter of the gallery, shifting from red to orange to ochre to pale purple, having crossed hemispheres to bring a pocket of the desert to New York.

All are painted from an aerial view as if you’re standing over the lizards, watching them crawl around and under your feet. As the deep red dirt of Wati Ngintaka (Perentie Lizard Man) with Young Lungkata (Blue Tongue Lizard) (2023) swirls into blackened shadow, the twisting reptiles float within a sea of speckles. Perentie lizards do wear a black netted pattern of yellow spots, but Uluru’s dabs of paint extend throughout the entirety of the works, blurring the boundary between their thick scaly bodies and the land. And that’s the point, isn’t it—that these entities are inseparable, made of the same dust?

This October marks forty years since the historic handback of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park to the Anangu people, in which the Australian government formally returned the land deeds of the sacred site to the Aboriginal Traditional Owners. Artist Reggie Uluru was an active participant in the decades-long movement for Indigenous land rights that preceded the handback, and later worked as a ranger and tour guide in the park. Uluru is his birthplace and his home, his culture, his family, his name. The celebration of this milestone in Indigenous land ownership is a call to reflect on the ongoing, global struggle for Indigenous land rights and how the Land Back movement can indeed become a concrete reality.

As he paints, Uluru sings inma, a practice he began at the age of seventy with the support of Walkatjara Art, an Anangu owned and governed art center. In Wati Ngintaka (Perentie Lizard Man) with Kuniya (Woma Python Woman) and Young Lungkata (Blue Tongue Lizard) (2024), the creatures from the Tjukurpa slowly gain bodies, arms and legs, with their bright white googly eyes staring out, awake and a bit ghostly. But then, seemingly, they dissolve again. Walkatjara Art’s website explains how dot painting, which has become widely recognized as a defining style of Australian Aboriginal art, is a means of concealment as much as of image making. At first, I saw the Uluru’s dots as a mass of stars, the desert ground covered in irregular croppings of bush, like embers jumping from a fire. Now: a shield, a veil. As much as Uluru is sharing his story with the viewer, the artist is also ensuring that the details are kept safe with those who have inherited it.

The exhibition layout is simple. There is no text on the walls except for the artist’s name vinyled in burnt sienna. Like the majority of American viewers, I did not come into the gallery with a deep background in Australian Aboriginal cultural and political history; I’m curious as to what an exhibition with a bit more contextualization could provide to these works, situating them both within a larger timeline and alongside contemporary painting. This will hopefully be the case with The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art, a major exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art from 1800 to present day that was slated to open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC this month, though the recent government shutdown now means that the museum is closed until further notice.

What can be taken from this selection of Reggie Uluru works at D’Lan Contemporary is that the story of the Tjukurpa is present, here and now, and continues to define the Anangu people’s relationship to their land. These paintings are themselves generational knowledge, bound to Uluru.