New York | The Aboriginal art of northeast Arnhem Land in Australia is both ancient and recent. For thousands of years, the Yolngu people of this remote, culturally rich region have been painting in the sand and on their bodies, rendering features of the landscape and legends of their ancestors into sacred designs.

But those drawings were ephemeral. The creation of a sellable, commodified art for outsiders – paintings made with human-hair brushes and traditional ochres that are stabilised with fixatives on a support of eucalyptus bark — began in 1935 through contact with white Australians.