Designs Made for Ceremony, and Designs Made to Be Sold

Warlpiri religion, practiced by the Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert region of Central Australia, is built on the Jukurrpa, the Dreaming, the ancestral era whose travelling beings shaped country and left law, ceremony and design encoded in songlines connecting sites, totems and family lines. Guruwari, sacred designs tied to a particular Dreaming and ceremony, are painted on the body and on ceremonial objects during restricted men's and women's ceremonies, and the right to reproduce a design belongs to the people and the ceremony it comes from, not to anyone who has merely seen or photographed it; this article does not reproduce one.

What is public is a different and deliberately public Warlpiri art practice that grew up alongside the closed one. From the 1980s, Warlpiri artists at Yuendumu and other Central Desert communities began painting on canvas for public sale, translating aspects of Jukurrpa iconography into a form intentionally created for exhibition and purchase by outsiders, work sold today through community owned art centers such as Yuendumu's own artist cooperative. The closed guruwari system that the public movement draws on had already been documented decades earlier, including by Nancy Munn's 1973 study of ceremonial body painting and totemic design, well before the public painting movement itself began, and Central Desert acrylic painting has since become one of the most visible Indigenous Australian art movements internationally. Warlpiri religion remains a living tradition, holding both its closed ceremonial designs and its public art within the same community without confusing the two.