Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative
Group of Australian aboriginal artists
The Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative was founded in 1987 in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, New South Wales. Among the legacies of the Co-operative are the Deadly Awards for achievement in the Indigenous Australian community, which occurred annually from 1995 to 2013. The 20th anniversary of the Co-operative was celebrated in 2007 with an exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.
The founding members of the Co-operative are Michael Riley (1960–2004), Avril Quaill, Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Foley, Brenda L Croft, Jeffrey Samuels, Euphemia Bostock, Fern Martins, Bronwyn Bancroft and Arone Meeks.
History
Boomalli has its roots in the National Black Theatre, which operated in Redfern in the 1970s and was part of "an explosion of pride and public confidence" in Aboriginal culture and organisations.
The urban Aboriginal art movement was given attention in 1984 with an exhibition in Woolloomooloo, a suburb of Sydney. This was followed by a 1986 exhibition. A number of critics gave negative comments and called urban Aboriginal art "a passing fad".
The ten artists who founded Boomalli were diverse in their art practices but together were seeking a way to be accepted in mainstream art. They have supported many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists through their gallery, which is now in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt. Their primary objective is to support artists from Aboriginal language groups in the state of New South Wales.
“Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative” enters the record as group of Australian aboriginal artists. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Boomalli, Aboriginal and Artists can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4943456. VIAF identifies the subject as 137729944. Authority coordinates are -33.885, 151.150. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1995, 2013 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.