Announcing the 2021Winner of the R. L. Shep Award

by: Roy Hamilton

Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End is the winner of this year’s R. L. Shep Award. TSA’s panel of judges selected it as the best book published in 2020 in the field of ethnic textile studies. Joanna Barrkman (senior curator of Southeast Asian and Pacific arts at the Fowler Museum at UCLA) edited the book, working collaboratively with an international team of twenty-five contributors. The Fowler Museum published the book, and the University of Washington Press is the distributor.

The book was chosen from a shortlist of three books announced in July. The other two books are Cloth That Changed the World: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz (Sarah Fee, ed.; Yale University Press) and Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk (Anna Jackson, ed.; V&A Publications). The panel of judges highly recommends all three books.

One of the many criteria evaluated by the judges is that the winning book should advance our field by presenting new or previously underreported material. Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End sets the highest possible standard in that regard. The breathtakingly fresh works of art presented in page after page of marvelous images, as well as the rich cultural histories of the Aboriginal communities that produced them, will prove virtually unknown to most readers in the United States. Even more impressively, the book was assembled with substantial involvement from indigenous contributors from those remote communities in Australia’s far north.

While Australian Aboriginal painting from the central and western desert regions has been widely recognized as a major phenomenon of the international contemporary art market for several decades now, this book and the Fowler Museum exhibition it accompanies constitute the first major presentation in the U.S. of the screen-printed textiles produced in the continent’s tropical Top End. The book begins with detailed coverage of five community art centers widely scattered across this region. The oldest is Tiwi Design, located in the town of Wurrumiyanga on Bathurst Island, established in 1969. The pioneering work of this center’s artists in the printed textile medium inspired the growth of multiple art centers across the region over the ensuing decades. The other centers presented in the book include Jilamara Arts and Crafts; Injalak Arts and Crafts Aboriginal Corporation; Bábbarra Women’s Centre; and Merrepen Arts, Culture and Language Corporation.

Subsequent chapters explore the evolution of this art form, from the extraordinarily deep roots of much of its imagery in traditional Aboriginal culture to the latest efforts to organize community-based fashion shows. Helpful interleaves cover topics including the technologies of screen printing and the collaborative nature of these processes. All of the featured works are attributed to the individual artists who created them (39 in total), and a section of artist biographies appears at the back.

A disclaimer is in order here. The rules for the award disqualify any book authored by a TSA board member, a previous winner (for six years), or any of the judges. None of these conditions apply to this year’s winner, but two of the three judges acknowledge professional associations with the publisher, the Fowler Museum. One has been retired for five years from a long career as a curator, and the other, while not a staff member, teaches there intermittently as an adjunct lecturer. The judges gave serious consideration to the possible perception of bias but were confident that they could judge each book solely on its merits. They concluded that the far greater injustice would be to deny the award to the book they unanimously agreed was the most extraordinary candidate.

Link to Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End