Aboriginal Art at Natural History Museum

Like art from other Pacific Rim cultures, paintings and sculpture by aboriginal Australians are showcased more and more in America. Now, a major traveling exhibition of these deeply symbolic works has arrived in Los Angeles.

“Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia” runs Saturday through Aug. 5 at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. It features more than 100 pieces, including wood sculpture, figurative paintings on bark or wood made from the mid-19th Century to 1970, and the pointillistic acrylic on canvas paintings made since 1970.

The earlier works are more figurative and often depict animals--such as crocodiles, fruit bats or kangaroos--humans and spirits. Those from the last two decades, based on sand paintings, are like contemporary abstracts against a frenzied background of myriad colorful dots.

Both relate to “Dreaming,” the complex spiritual and mythical system at the core of aboriginal culture.

“The Dreaming is supposed to be a time when mythical beings (known as Dreamings) performed marvelous acts and shaped the world,” said anthropologist Francoise Dussart, who co-authored the exhibit catalogue. “They gave people laws of society, rituals and religious ceremonies and all of Australia is mapped out by travels of these beings. All of this appeared in dreams to ancestors of the aboriginal people and has been passed on by them ever since.”

Thus, the figurative works in the exhibit depicting spirits represent these mythical “Dreamings.” The contemporary-style pieces may represent a mythological narrative, or a description of the social rules that the mythical beings are to have laid out.

In the early 1980s, Dussart lived in Australia for five years, two of them with a group in the central desert whose ritual life she studied. She hopes that above all, viewers come away from the exhibit with the awareness that the aboriginal people, long “deprived of their land” by European colonialists and formerly confined to reservations like Native Americans, do indeed “have a culture,” she said.

“I have an aboriginal friend who said: ‘Our culture is well alive, thank you very much. We are not a dying race.’ ”

“Dreamings” was organized by New York’s Asia Society and the Southern Australia Museum, Adelaide. Caz Gallery in West Hollywood, a co-sponsor of the exhibition, will present “The Aboriginal Australian,” a show of bark paintings and contemporary paintings running May 19-July 29.