Makinti Napanangka: The Embodied Archive, a curated selection of paintings by this pioneering artist of the Western Desert is on display in at D Lan Galleries New York through 20 March 2026. In this video, Gallery Manager Lucy Foster, and Curator, Vanessa Merlino, take a walk through the exhibition.

In an essay excerpt by curator, Vanessa Merlino, ‘This focused collection by Pintupi artist Makinti Napanangka (c.1922–2011) is a meditation on the performative lives of the dancing women who shape her Country in the Western Desert region of the Northern Territory. In this ethereal body of work, each painting balances an enduring ancestral presence with the transience of the human form. Napanangka’s career developed in her senior years, her painted surfaces unprecedented among those of other Western Desert painters from the mid 1990s. Never conforming to the techniques of the local contemporary Indigenous art movement, she favoured the brush over dots applied with a fine stick to record her gestures. Rather than mapping the geographical boundaries of her Country, the canvas reverberates with the pulse of the Country, rhythm and touch inviting feeling as much as seeing. This is painting as embodied memory: not an image of Country but a trace of a body moving through it.

Napanangka was born at Lupulnga, south of the Walungurru (Kintore) community, and spent her formative years living nomadically around the giant salt lake of Kaakurutintjinya (Lake Macdonald). In the company of her extended family, she walked into the Haasts Bluff ration depot in the early 1940s, eventually settling at the government settlement of Papunya and later at Walungurru. When she began painting in the mid 1990s, a permanent speech impediment constricted her voice, and she was almost blind from cataracts. Yet she was determined to give form to her beloved traditional lands, Lupulnga, her birthplace, which she held in memory through fifty years of displacement as she moved east towards the government settlements. Every canvas became an act of return.’

Read the full essay and view the exhibition online here.

Video by Bower Blue.