Join us on Friday March 28 from 12 – 1pm for a moderated discussion between Professor Greg Castillo and curatorial fellow Katina Davidson (Kullilli & Yuggera).

We are honored to be welcoming Greg Castillo to Kluge-Ruhe this month to celebrate the opening of the exhibition In the Beginning: Paintings by Senior Artists of the Spinifex Arts Project. The exhibition is drawn from a multi-year gift beginning in 2021 of 35 paintings from the collection of Greg Castillo and Gary Brown.

“The historical resilience of the Spinifex people and their generosity in sharing their knowledge and experience turned me into a collector. While teaching at the University of Sydney and doing historical research on cold war culture, I became interested in Aboriginal contemporary art. Those interests overlapped in the story of how the Australian government exiled Spinifex people from their homelands in order to create an atomic bomb testing site, and how they reclaimed their territory generations later. While visiting a Sydney gallery I asked to see Spinifex work and, amazingly, the gallerist discovered an uncatalogued painting that had been gathering dust in the stockroom for nearly a decade. It was love at first sight, and I was hooked.”
– Greg Castillo

Greg Castillo is a professor of Architectural History at University of California, Berkeley, where he specializes in the architectural history of Interwar and Postwar America and Europe. He became interested in Aboriginal Australian art while teaching architectural history at the University of Sydney. As an art historian, he is very interested in how artists develop over time and he published an article titled Spinifex People as Cold War Moderns. He has carefully collected multiple works by individual artists to show the trajectory of their careers.

In the Beginning is curated by Katina Davidson (Kullilli/Yuggera), who is undertaking a six-month curatorial residency over the 2024-25 academic year.  Davidson is Curator of Indigenous Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. Davidson’s residency has been supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, in partnership with QAGOMA.