Exhibitions
Next Venue: “TRUE: Kevin Gilbert 1933–1993” at Tuggeranong Arts Centre,ACT 13 June 2025–7 August 2025
click to enlarge images
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2023
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2016
Museum of Contemporary Art collection
Museum of Contemporary Art collection
MUSEUM of CONTEMPORARY ART SYDNEY, 2016
KEVIN GILBERT: ABOUT THE ARTWORKS
These ten lino prints by the activist and poet Kevin Gilbert depict Aboriginal subjects, stories and heroes. They were made when the artist was in prison in 1969 using the most basic materials: lino taken from the floor and cutting tools fashioned from a used spoon, a fork, gem blades and nails. Gilbert printed the images using the back of a spoon to rub and transfer the ink onto paper. He made a conscious decision to exhibit his prints in a gallery context in 1971, when his artworks were first exhibited at an Australia Council exhibition at the Arts Council gallery. In doing so, these works are widely regarded as being the first by an Aboriginal printmaker.
The first print made in the series is My Father’s Studio, in which Gilbert wanted to show ‘the natural pride and completeness of the Aboriginal artist, the cave, the art, the landscape’.* A similar desire informed Corroboree Spirit, which depicts an Aboriginal group who are not only part of the landscape but inseparable from it. Gilbert’s use of his Wiradjuri language in the titles of some of these artworks was a conscious act of cultural affirmation. More generally it provides a deeper understanding and context of not only the Aboriginal experience of artist as historian, social commentator and agitator for change but also forms the basis of the articulate way he has threaded this powerful perspective throughout the development of his poetry, essays, playwriting, photography and award-winning literature. Apart from being the first Aboriginal printmaker, Gilbert was also the first Aboriginal playwright to have his work staged by an all-Aboriginal cast with The Cherry Pickers (1968). Whether through art, literature or political activism, Gilbert aimed to ‘expound on the Aboriginal situation by whatever way, through art or whatever form’.[1]
I Do Have a Belief - Belconnen Art Centre, ACT, 2013
I Do Have a Belief, Civic Library, Canberra
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
As a child, sitting, drawing in the ashes of the campfires with twigs and charcoal, aware of the old pieces of tin, hessian bag and canvas that formed our shanty, our humpies, I never even dreamt of being an artist. I was very much aware of the colonial attitudes, the injustice of having my land, Wiradjuri land, stolen from us, my people forced to live in refugee situations, on travelling stock reserves, forbidden to be in the white township after dark, the tens of decades of massacre, oppression, abuse of our human rights. In 1965, mature, I saw art, and writing as a way to communicate.
Kevin Gilbert
ABOUT THE ARTIST
b.1933, Condobolin, New South Wales. d.1993, Canberra.
Born on the banks of the Kalara (Lachlan River) in Condobolin in central New South Wales, Kevin Gilbert is a descendant of the Wiradjuri nation/s. He was orphaned at a young age and was raised, along with two of his sisters, by family at a fringe camp near Condobolin after they escaped from the orphanages where they were initially sent. After working his way from itinerant jobs to station manager, he was gaoled for 14 years for the murder of his first wife. During his time in prison Gilbert developed lino cutting techniques and fostered other interests across various arts professions including poetry and writing. His play The Cherry Pickers was nominated for the Captain Cook Memorial Award in 1970, and is credited with starting the Black Theatre movement in New South Wales.
In 1971 Gilbert joined the Gurindji Land Rights campaign and was instrumental in establishing the Aboriginal Tent Embassy opposite Parliament House in Canberra in 1972. He crystallised central issues of the Aboriginal political struggle in his book Because a White Man'll Never Do It and exposed the reality of surviving genocide in the oral history Living Black, a collection of Aboriginal people’s stories that won the National Book Council award in 1978. In 1979 he spearheaded the National Aboriginal Government protest on Capital Hill, Canberra, calling for acceptance of, and respect for, Aboriginal Sovereignty. In 1981 he moved to the bush on the Queanbeyan River and coordinated the Treaty'88 campaign.
To coincide with the 1988 opening of the new Parliament House, Gilbert commissioned and exhibited the ground breaking photographic group exhibition Inside Black Australia: Aboriginal Photographers’ Exhibition. Later that year the Governor-General presented him the 1988 Human Rights Award for Literature for his anthology Inside Black Australia, but Gilbert publicly refused it on the grounds that Aboriginal peoples continue to be denied basic human rights in their own land. In 1992 Gilbert was instrumental in re-establishing the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and spent most of the last year of his life there.
Gilbert’s art is held in most major national and state gallery collections and has been exhibited in The Netherlands, Greece, England, South Africa and the USA.
In 1992 he was awarded a four-year Creative Arts Fellowship for his outstanding artistic contribution to the nation but died six months later aged 59. Gilbert was posthumously presented the RAKA poetry award for Black from the Edge and was highly commended in the ACT Book of the Year award in 1995. His autobiographical book for children, Me and Mary Kangaroo, was shortlisted for the 1995 Australian Multicultural Award. It is now available through Amazon books. [go to ‘Books’ tab]
His lino print series was exhibited in the MCA exhibition Tyerabarrbowaryaou II: I shall never become a white man for the Havana Biennale, Cuba in 1994.
People Are legends
ACT Heritage Library, Canberra, 2014
Selected Exhibitions:
2025 ‘TRUE: Kevin Gilbert 1933–1993, Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Canberra, ACT
2025 ‘What We Owe’one of three artists at Griffith Regional Art Gallery, NSW.
2024 ‘Dhuluny: The war that never ended’ Bathurst Reginal Art Gallery
2023/2024 ‘Artists in Focus, Kevin Gilbert’, Level 2, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.
2024 ‘Prints from Studio One’. Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Canberra,group exhibition https://the-riotact.com/canberra-was-australias-printmaking-capital-a-tuggeranong-arts-centre-exhibitions-shows-why/743860
2022 ‘Imbas: a well at the bottom of the sea’ with Claire Milledge, 2022, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Wharf 2/3.
2016 ‘Tomorrow, Today, Yesterday’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
2013 ‘I Do Have a Belief: Kevin Gilbert (1933-1993) Art Retrospective’, Belconnen Arts Centre, ACT
2004 Athens Olympics, Greece
2001 ‘Intermission’, Wharf 2 Gallery, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney
- Kevin Gilbert Retrospective, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-op, Sydney
2000 ‘Breath of Life: Moments in Transit towards Aboriginal Sovereignty’
- Visions of Australia National Tour, CHOGM, Durban, South Africa,
- Rebecca Hossack Gallery, Soho, London
1999. Umbrella Gallery, Townsville
1998 Indigenous Pathways, Toowoomba
1997 Tandanya – National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide
- The Armidale Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place, Armidale
- Moree Plains Gallery, Moree
- Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington, Sydney
- Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth
1996 ‘Breath of Life: Moments in Transit towards Aboriginal Sovereignty’, Canberra Contemporary Art Space
1995 Yiribana, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
1994 ‘Tyerabarrbowaryaou II – I shall never become a white man’
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
- 5th Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba
- Urban Focus, National Gallery of Australia
1994 ‘Who’s Afraid of Red, Black and Yella’
- Museum of Ethnology, Rotterdam
- Legends from Down Under, Boomerang Galerie, Amsterdam
- New Tracks – Old land
- Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon
1993
- Memorial Tribute, Gallery One, National Gallery of Australia
- New Tracks – Old Land
Australian Galleries, Green Street, Soho, New York
Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences, Darwin.
Queensland Aboriginal Creations, Brisbane.
Redcliff Entertainment Centre, Redcliff, Queensland
1992
- New Tracks-Old Land, Massachusetts Collage of Art, Huntington Gallery, Boston Massachusetts
- Painting Our Dreaming Alliance Francaise Gallery, Canberra
- ’92 Pressin, Spiral Arm Gallery, Canberra
1991 ‘Tjukurrpa Nganampa Kantyila Kanyintjaku – Keeping Our Dreaming Strong,’
- Hackett, ACT
- Alliance Francaise Gallery, Canberra.
- Social Images, Gorman House, Canberra.
1990 Desert Art, Albert Hall, Canberr
1989
- ‘Narragunnawalli’, Canberra Contemporary Art Space
- ‘Inside Black Australia’, Aboriginal Photographers Exhibition,
- Showground, Wagga Wagga,NSW.
- Trades and Labour Club, Newcastle, NSW.
- Queensland Museum, Brisbane.
- Museum of Victoria, Melbourne.
1988 ‘Inside Black Australia,’ Aboriginal Photographers Exhibition, Albert Hall, Canberra
- Leftbank Bookshop,
- Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney.
- Centreprize, London.
- Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Op, Sydney
1975 Koorainghat Gardens Art Gallery, Taree, NSW
1971 Robin Hood Gallery, Sydney
1970 Arts Council Gallery, East Sydney
Collections:
National Gallery of Australia
National Museum of Australia
Canberra Museum & Art Gallery
Art Gallery of NSW
Queensland Art Gallery
Queensland Museum
West Australian Art Gallery
Powerhouse Museum
Tandanya Aboriginal Art Gallery
Museum of Victoria
Queensland University of Technology
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
private collections