Emily Kam Kngwarray was in her mid-70s when she first put paint to canvas. Born in 1914 in Alhalker Country, home to the Anmatyerr people and located in the Northern Territory of Australia, Kngwarray was a ceremonial artist, storyteller, cultural custodian and matriarch who spent much of her adult life also working on cattle stations built by white settlers who renamed the surrounding area Utopia.
But when her very first acrylic painting on canvas, Emu Woman (1988-89), was shown in Sydney a year after it was created as part of a commission from the Australian businesswoman Janet Holmes à Court, it catapulted Kngwarray to art world superstardom. Inundated with requests from numerous art dealers and others, what followed was an intense period of production during which it is estimated that the artist made a staggering 2,000 to 3,000 paintings in the eight years before she died in 1996.
