Nestled in the Redfern neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, among an array of community centers, apartment buildings, and public artworks, is a mural that envelops an oddly shaped, five-sided building. Rendered primarily in red, yellow, and black (the colors of the Australian Aboriginal flag), the mural also includes “Welcome to Redfern” in a neat script, “The Block” in a different font, representations of local youth who worked on the mural, and a reproduction of an archival image of Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal warrior known for his fierce resistance against colonization in the 18th century. The work known as Welcome to Redfern (2012–2013) was created through a collaboration between multimedia artist Reko Rennie (Kamilaroi, b. 1974) and children from the neighborhood. As a whole, the mural speaks to the long-standing presence of First Nations people in Redfern and Sydney more broadly, including their resilience and resistance. As a site-specific work of art, how might Welcome to Redfern fit into a broader category of global contemporary Indigenous art? For one, the work is located in a region that, for generations before and after colonization, has been cosmopolitan and multicultural, as well as stewarded by many sovereign Aboriginal groups that continue to live, migrate, and travel through this space.

While in residence at the Center, I primarily worked on completing my third dissertation chapter on Rennie. Fortunately, this coincided with the exhibition The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art, which included work by Rennie and other contemporary and historical Indigenous artists from Australia. The exhibition represents a continued interest in the United States in Aboriginal Australian art. In addition, during my time in Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to consult collections at museums around the region, including the National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. As I completed this chapter, fellows and staff at the Center provided valuable insight and generous conversation that ultimately shaped the final product.

Welcome to Redfern is one of many works I write about in my dissertation, “Relationality and Being: Indigeneity, Place, and Transit in Global Contemporary Art.” In the dissertation, I analyze the work of Emma Robbins (Diné, b. 1986), Demond Melancon (b. 1978), and Rennie over three chapters, each focusing on an individual artist’s practice. I consider indigeneity as an unstable category that is not only a political and cultural identity, but also a relational analytic tool and concept that presents differently in each artist’s geopolitical context. I argue that all three artists produce work that responds to place and history through a lens of real and imagined indigeneity. How is indigeneity depicted? How is it related to both a concept and an identity? Rennie’s collaborative mural, for example, acknowledges Sydney’s long-standing multiculturalism through both specific and broad references to Indigenous symbols, including the history of Redfern and Aboriginal activism signaled through the work’s color scheme and the image of Pemulwuy. The mural also reflects contemporary desires to produce culture through ever-changing artistic practices, including graffiti/street art and intergenerational collaboration.

The dissertation more broadly considers the meaningful engagements of specific places and their peoples, symbols of Indianness, and the repetition of cultural and aesthetic practices by these artists. Importantly, in prioritizing Indigenous-to-Indigenous and Indigenous-to-Black relationalities, such as Rennie’s collaboration with Aboriginal youth (as discussed in the third chapter), these artists reveal how global interactions operate on smaller, regional scales. In the first chapter, I examine how Robbins translates Californian Indian treaty histories in Los Angeles through her own Diné worldview and aesthetics. And in the second chapter, I look at how Melancon, a Black Masking Mardi Gras Indian in New Orleans, embodies and pushes past “the Indian” as a signifier of sovereign resistance in his intricately beaded suits. Meanwhile, Rennie, who lives in Melbourne but is tethered to Kamilaroi Country, works across an array of media, demonstrating that his relationship to his Indigenous identity is created out of displacement and, necessarily, transit and movement. I use site-specific and kin-centric methods of research, as well as interdisciplinary scholarship and understandings of the world informed by my Diné subjectivity, to articulate this expansive project within an unsettled and malleable framework of global contemporary Indigenous art.

Yale University
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2024–2026

In fall 2026, Isabella Shey Robbins will join the Art History program at the University of Arizona as an assistant professor specializing in Indigenous art history.