Here we have two abstract art exhibitions from two different centuries and two different continents.

Surprisingly – or not – they’ve got a lot in common.

Moreover, they’re both slated for September shows, side-by-side, curated by Katie Lee Koven, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art Director at Utah State University.

Abstraction and the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings from Australia’s Western Desert (1971 – Present), featuring historic and contemporary works from private collections, runs from September 12 –  December 12, 2015. Transcendence: Abstraction and Symbolism in the American West, drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, runs from September 1, 2015 through May 7, 2016.

“For both, I was interested in visually reconsidering modern and contemporary art in terms of the cultural dialog between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples,” she says. “There are some connections to be made between the American West and the Australian desert and the output and dialogs between the two cultures.”

For example, there are more than fifty artworks spanning the first paintings at Papunya, a remote Australian Indigenous settlement, to the present day. With fewer than 600 in existence, the “Papunya boards” from the 1970s have a singular status within the history of Australian Aboriginal art.

Encouraged by a Sydney schoolteacher who provided materials—acrylic paint and Masonite boards and, later, canvas – to create permanent works, the artists employed symbols used in other contexts. “Out of it came the Western painting movement,” she says.

Then there is the pottery by Maria and Julian Martinez. After a New Mexico-based archeologist discovered a shard of black-glazed pottery with an unknown motif, both thousands of years old, Maria worked to discover how to recreate the finish while Julian worked to incorporate the motif into contemporary pottery.

“It would not have existed without the relationship between the archeologist and the potters,” she says.

The two exhibits, Koven says, are all about those kinds of relationships – and in rethinking the siloed ways that history teaches us that artists and cultures experience the world.

Abstract art, it seems, is part of a universal consciousness

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