‘Incredibly healing’: artist Tony Albert receives more than 2,000 public donations of racist Aboriginalia

‘I didn’t know what Aboriginalia was,’ says Carolyn Ienna, who last week donated a painted picture of an Aboriginal man with a spear to Tony Albert’s Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, Not a Souvenir. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

Five months ago Indigenous artist Tony Albert made a public request for donations of Aboriginalia – souvenirs, homewares and other objects depicting Aboriginal people and designs, often as caricatures, that were created and sold by non-Indigenous people.

It was a request that accompanied his career-spanning Not a Souvenir exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, which featured 4,400 objects from the artist’s own collection – one he started in the 1980s as a child.