Not Dead Yet in Canberra: art of protest, politics, and propaganda

Therese Ritchie and Chips Mackinolty are exhibiting Not Dead Yet: A Retrospective Exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery from July 5 to September 14, 2014. The exhibit's sub-title is “Truth Before Politics: Together, Sideways and Apart.”

It is a powerful display of ‘alternative printmaking’ in which the graphics are the art of protest, politics, and propaganda during 1970s Australia. The Charles Darwin University in Australia began collecting political poster prints in the early 1980s for its own permanent holdings. The movement arose with graphic art and printmaking ventures, such as Green Ant Research Art and Publishing formed by Chips Mackinolty and Peter Cooke in 1990, and by Therese Ritchie who joined the pair shortly afterwards.

In parallel came the rise of printmaking in regional and remote areas of Australia. During this time Charles Darwin University opened its first printmaking operation, known today as Northern Editions Printmaking Studio.

Hence this exhibition, Not Dead Yet, brings together indigenous and non-indigenous ‘alternative printmakers’ to show their interconnected histories, as well as their related, rather than isolated, experiences.

Not Dead Yet brings together prints from eight earlier exhibitions as well as art shown for the first time outside of Northern Territory. It features screenprints, posters, drawings, photographs, digital collages, and limited edition fine art prints and paintings dating from 1969 (Mackinolty) and 1988 (Ritchie) to 2010. Therefore the audience can see the developments over time, from traditional printmaking techniques to recent photographic media and hand-cut stencils to computer-generated digital prints on paper and canvas.

The four decades of prints of living contemporary artists is a significant contribution to Australian art history.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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