This year's Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair was the most successful for one remote central Australian Indigenous Art Centre based in Yuendumu, 290 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs.
Cecilia Alfonso has been the manager of Warlukurlangu Artists for 20 years. It's an Aboriginal-owned art centre established in 1985.
Ms Alfonso said she and her assistant, Gloria Morales, sold more than $250,000 of artwork in three days at the fair.
"We sold hundreds of paintings," she said.
"The work is very consistent. It's high quality, and it's a reasonable price. So we have over 800 artists, and we take as much as we can possibly fit in our trailer and troopy."
Ms Alfonso said the fair, which attracted more than 70 art centres from all over the country, had taken a two-year hiatus but remained as an online event while the world grappled with the global pandemic.
She said, surprisingly, COVID-19 did not have a detrimental effect on the art centre's bottom line.
"[Sales] plummeted for one month, and then they went straight back up and we were busier than ever," Ms Alfonso said.
"We produce over 10,000 paintings a year and we sell 10,000 paintings a year. So the demand is there."
Ms Alfonso said the art centre was vital to the community.
"Our strategy has been to maximise engagement to give people something to do in a place of chronic unemployment and lack of meaningful activity," she said.
"We basically sold non-stop for three days. So there was a really good turnout of people."
Licensing 'sort of a dirty word'
Ms Alfonso said it had been important for the art centre to diversify into other media by using licensed artwork on a variety of different products.
"Most communities are attempting to do that now. So it's becoming a lot more common for art centres to agree to license the products," she said.
"We didn't see any negatives to generating an income from the archive of images that we had."
As one of the first centres to diversify into another income stream, Ms Alfonso said that there was some criticism from within the art world.
"They thought that I was denigrating the art and making it too common," she said.
"I think that they seem to think the way that we are so commercial was sort of a dirty word."
Ms Alfonso said the economic value had grown steadily over the years with the licensed products worth around 25 per cent of the centre's income over the past financial year.
"We do fabrics with Spotlight and we do these pots that became viral with Bunnings, which has been a really positive, fun, very lucrative deal for the artists," she said.
Despite the diversification being positive for the artists and the centre, Ms Alfonso wanted to reiterate that it was not the sole purpose of the centre.
"One point that I think is really important to me is that we don't make the products ourselves," she said.
"We strongly believe that our core business is making paintings and facilitating the production of art because we're there to give Aboriginal people something to do."
Ms Alfonso said the licensing products were simply "money for jam".
