BHP Billiton puts up $17.5m to support indigenous art festivals

BHP Billiton digs deep to make Adelaide the centre of indigenous art.

Art Gallery of South Australia curator of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Nici Cumpston, left, and BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam asset president, Jacqui McGill, at the gallery. Picture: Calum Robertson

South Australian governments may have been slow to celebrate indigenous art, but today Premier Jay Weatherill will reveal he has brokered a deal in which resources giant BHP Billiton will spend $17.5 million on three ­Aboriginal art festivals across the next five years.

The biennial Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art from October next year is ­intended to establish Adelaide as the nation’s indigenous art capital — a gateway city between coastal art collectors and popular artists in the state’s remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands and beyond.

Tarnanthi is at once an art fair, museum exhibition and performance opportunity open to artists from all states. It had its first outing across 22 venues in Adelaide last year, overseen by the Art Gallery of South Australia, and was capitalised with an initial $4m in sponsorship from the resources company.

AGSA director Nick Mitzevich says: “Once in every 10 or 15 years there’s a project that has the capacity to transform the cultural sector. This is one of those projects.”

Mitzevich says the unprecedented level of support from the commercial sector will allow the gallery to train curators, invest in artists and acquire their art.

Last year’s event showcased only Australian artists but from next year the brief will expand to ­include other first nations artists.

Jacqui McGill, BHP’s asset president at Olympic Dam, says she expects the sponsorship to generate an even bigger event than last year’s Tarnanthi, which was experienced by 311,000 ­people. The company sees the sponsorship as a cultural commitment towards those commun­ities with which it already has business relationships, being the state itself and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

The inaugural Tarnanthi was intended to rival the established ­indigenous art fairs in Cairns and Darwin that are held each ­August and Alice Springs’s ­Desert Mob. Last year 5500 visitors were ­attracted to the two-day art fair, which generated more than $450,000 in sales for artists and art centres.

The Cairns Art Fair, by comparison, had 51,000 visitors to all events across three days and ­reported $520,000 in art sales.

AGSA says Tarnanthi presents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art on a scale never before seen in Australia. The centrepiece exhibition at AGSA, from October 8 last year to January 17 this year, attracted 127,115 visitors. Across all events there were 311,063 visitors.